Governance Failures, Not Technology Failures
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.
What IT Governance Defines
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.
Recognisable Patterns of Absence
- Shadow IT proliferates as business units bypass IT procurement to get tools approved faster
- Technology investments approved on vendor presentations rather than business cases
- Post-implementation reviews don't happen, so the organisation never learns whether the investment worked
- Security incidents occur because nobody had clear accountability for patching a specific category of system
- Large ERP implementations go significantly over budget because scope was never formally defined
Compliance Exercise vs Management Practice
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.
