Most IT leaders aren't imaginative. They take ideas from other sources and weigh the pros and cons to pick something that fits the company's strategy and budget.

I think it depends a lot on what the software is and what the industry is. You could leverage reports from consulting groups (I can't remember the name of the big one, maybe McKinsey). As someone else mentioned, gathering input from employees can be a good data point to have too.

I think by looking at software and industry trends you can come up with some ideas about what you want to do. Then I would bounce those ideas off of people you trust who are knowledgeable in your industry or company.

Many companies are moving to, or already in, the cloud to some extent. DevOps and DevSecOps are pretty popular. Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) and the associated concepts/tech are also on the rise, such as automated testing. Machine learning is starting to take off, but I'm not sure it's right for all companies (smaller companies might be better suited to buy rather than build).