Roles and responsibilities: Business Owner, IT Application Owner and Owned by fields

[Mouad2]

Hi fellow ServiceNow experts, 

1. I've been asked by a client to define the roles and responsibilities of the following ownership fields

• Business Owner (Business Application): Person who owns the application from the business side. Every application should have an assigned business owner.
• IT Application Owner (Business Application): Person who owns the application from the IT side.
• Owned By (Services)

2. Is the Service Owner and the Owned By the same thing? If not, where would you recommend documenting the Service Owner?

3. Can the Owned By be the same individual as the IT Application Owner? I have not been able to concrete answers in ServiceNow's various documentation sites (Docs, Community, NowLearning, Partnerportal)

Thank you for your input!

[Jon Miller1]

We recently transitioned to a Plan-Build-Run operating model within IT, Mouad, and that's really helped me clarify the differences. Though I should caution that I've only just rolled out this change last week and haven't really gotten feedback yet.

We have a Business Process Center of Excellence (or COE) that is made up of business leaders, one per business function. Wherever possible, I try to make sure the Business Owner of a Business Application is one of those COE Leads. One of their responsibilities is to define the Business Criticality and Data Classification of their applications.

I've redefined the IT Application Owner of a Business Application as needing to be a Solution Architect in the Plan operation of IT. This aligns with ServiceNow best-practice (in their CSDM) that the Business Application CI is a design CI. That is the role of the Solution Architect... to design solutions with a focus on the Business Applications in their "portfolio". Their responsibility is the other fields on the Business Application plus the relationship to Business Capabilities and Application Services.

I've only just loaded all of the Application Services into our CMDB and defined the "Owned By" as a Solution Engineer in the Build operation of IT. This enforces the hand-off from a Solution Architect (who will determine which instances/services are required for a given deployment of a Business Application) to a Solution Engineer (who will build the instances/services).

I am expecting the Support Group, Change Group and Managed By Group to come from the Run operation of IT. But that group is still in transition so I haven't populated those yet. But my intent is for that to enable the service transition from Build to Run as each application service is deployed.

I'm not quite sure what you meant by "Service Owner" as I don't see that on the Application Service record. Maybe you're referring to other service types which we haven't implemented yet.

Hope that helps.

Jon

[Mouad2]

Hi Jon,

Thank you for your wonderful input, this very helpful. Your Plan-Build-Run operating model makes sense to me. I like how you've associated IT Application Owner to the Solution Architect due to the Business Application living in the design domain.

Yes the "Service Owner" is not a field in the Service form but if you look at the CSDM Process Guide 3.0 on NowCreate you will see a reference to the "Application Service Owner" (shown as 1 below). I wanted to know what field I could use for the "Application Service Owner" role and responsibility (shown as 2 below).

This is important to me because we have service request catalogue items that are owned by the "Application Service Owner" and fulfillment of a service request requires the owner or "Application Service Owner" approval. The closest field that I could use for the "Application Service Owner" role is the Owned by field on the Service record.

What field would you suggest using for the role of the "Application Service Owner" for the above service request approval use case?

Thanks,

Mouad

[Jon Miller1]

You raise a good point Mouad. I think you're right that the "Owned By" field on the Application Service is the "Application Service Owner". If that's the case, my usage is not correct as I'm defining the "Owned By" as the person responsible for "building" the service. If you're right (and I think you are) it is actually the service owner responsible for "running" the service (meeting SLAs, including availability, etc). That does actually make much more sense. -Jon

[Rum]

My understanding as we just implemented ServiceNow recently and currently going through the next release is Service Owner is accountable for the strategy, delivery, and improvement of a service.