Most enterprise technology failures — cost overruns, failed implementations, security incidents, compliance violations — are not primarily technology failures. They are governance failures. The technology behaved as designed. What failed was the process by which technology decisions were made, funded, managed, and evaluated against the outcomes they were intended to produce.

IT governance is the framework that defines how technology decisions are made within an organisation: who has authority to approve technology spending, how technology investments are aligned to business strategy, how technology risk is identified and managed, how technology performance is measured, and how the organisation learns from both success and failure in technology programmes.

The COBIT framework — Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies — provides a globally recognised governance structure that many Indian enterprises in regulated industries have adopted as a compliance baseline. But COBIT adoption as compliance exercise produces different outcomes than COBIT adoption as genuine management practice.