Business Application ownership

[Heather McElroy]

I would like to get others' insights around the following roles as it relates to business application ownership: Business Owner, IT Application Owner and a custom field, Vertical Owner.

In previous years, organizations that I have been apart of  typically defined the Business Owner as someone who is responsible for an application from the business side and IT Application Owner as someone who is responsible for the application from the IT side. Also, the IT Application Owner is responsible for managing the business application within the CMDB for accuracy and completeness. It seems to get a little gray when dealing with SaaS apps.  How do you typically assign the IT App Owner when the app is managed externally? Is it partly a hidden cost on the business side, where the Business Owner need to identify a technical representative for this role? 

Lastly, I mentioned a custom field, Vertical Owner. I have seen this field added to the business app form, along with Business Owner and IT App Owner. It's described as the vertical owner, typically from IT and may be a direct report of the CIO, for example.  Have others used Vertical Owner? If so, how did you define it and how did you use it with SaaS apps?

Thanks all!

[Jon Miller1]

We are just implementing a change to our approach to this, Heather. IT are transitioning to a Plan-Build-Run operating model and it's really helping to clarify roles. I strongly recommend you read ServiceNow's Common Service Data Model (CSDM) paper if you haven't already. It clarifies a few key aspects as well.

A Business Application is defined in the CSDM as a "design" CI, not an operational one. As such, it should be used for planning purposes, not for operational activities. So, for us, the IT Owner is the "Solution Architect" who's portfolio the application falls into from a roadmap/design/architecture perspective. The Business Owner is their counter-part on our business process COE (business leaders per function/process).

We do have some exceptions, mostly SaaS, like you describe. The determination from the CIO was that, if you want IT to "own" an application and support it, IT has to pay for it. If you want IT to pay for it, IT also has to "own" and support it. I still keep applications/services in the app portfolio that IT do not "own" but, in those cases, I make the IT Owner = Business Owner. I also use the Application Portfolio Manager field, populated with the IT Leader (one level down from the CIO) when owned by IT and left blank if owned by the business. That allows me to easily report on who is actually responsible for an app and I adjust my annual APM assessments accordingly.

For us, what I think you describe as the "vertical owner" is actually defined at the Application Service level, not the Business Application. The Application Service corresponds to each instance of a Business Application. So where we have multiple instances of an application (maybe per BU, maybe per location), there are multiple Application Services related to a single Business Application. The CSDM defines the Application Service as more operational so also identifies who is responsible for the "build" activities and the group that supports it.

Note that the change I am implementing right now is to make our Solution Architects (in the new IT Plan organization) responsible for maintaining the Business Application data and our Solution Engineers (in the new IT Build organization) responsible for maintaining the Application Service. I'm still fleshing that out (there maybe some aspects of the Application Service that needs to maintained by the Run org).

Hopefully that helps (or at least gives our perspective).

Jon

[Rose LeSage]

Hi! We are using these fields the same way you described. Business owner represents the business side. IT Owner represents the IT side. We also identify these ownership roles for SaaS apps. There are very few applications in our environment that don't have some touch point to IT, so there is almost always an IT liaison identified to support the application needs. For example, the SaaS may need a punch through our firewall or will have some type of integration with another system. If we have an application that truly has no IT Touchpoint, we assign the IT Ownership to our IT Director of Application Portfolio Management. We still want to know that the application exists in our environment, how it is being used then that information can be used for application rationalization. We do not use vertical owner.