I have been talking to lots of people while traveling across India about IT Governance. Some understood its importance, while others didnt. Let me share this story and see if this drives the message (Business Alignment of IT):

I had a frustating experience with a cellular company.
i) Everytime I call their call-centre, NEW reps would ask me to explain the problem -- again n again n again. This was an annoying experience. This company probably has no issue/incident logging mechanism nor do they give issue number for future reference. Or if they have it then there is no mandate by business stakeholders of its proper usage.

ii) Whenever I asked for the Value Added Services, I was told that it takes 4 hours to activate such services. Most of the time such services wont be available even after 12 hours of the request. The company reps didnt know what SLA means when I confronted them with the term.

iii)Once I had made a payment by cheque which was lost by them. When I was apprised of the non-payment (ofcourse the company didnt accept the fact that they had lost my cheque NOR DO THEY GIVE RECEIPT FOR PAYMENT BY CHEQUE), I made another successful payment the very next day. After a few days of this payment, collection agency was running after me for collecting the payment.

After much pursuasion I got to talk to one of their senior/middle managers about governance in their company, she had no clue of what I was talking about. Somehow I was able to convince them that I had a genuine case and when I insisted, I was paid for the mental harassment. Not only this, I walked out of their network as a disgruntled consumer.

iv) More interestingly, while all this was going on, their Sales reps kept calling me to see if I can bring my family members to their network.

This experience was an interesting one for me because the senior management of the company probably were not able to see that their "IT" isnt aligned with their "BUSINESS" departments(Help Desk, Billing, Collection and Sales) that well.

The company has 10million consumers. Lets say 5% of the consumer are not happy and the company pays compensation of $50 (either a gift cheque or free calls/SMS or some other kind of waivers) to 1% of the consumers every year. Also take into account that 1% disgruntled consumers walk out of their network and there is a loss of $200 per year per consumer. You do the maths (probably a hit of $25Mn/year to their revenues ?)whether it makes sense to have a strong IT Governance initiative installed in this organization. I dont think I need to stress upon the cut throat competition we see in customer acquisition in this industry.

Recently I read in the media that this company put a lid over the controversy involving its accounting practice quoting that differences were purely technical in nature and have no bearing on operational performance the company.