Infrastructure management is undergoing a transformation. ITIL can help manage conflicting demands like – “low cost but high service quality”, “ubiquitous access but enhanced security”?

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Defining the Service Owner role - Part 2

In part 1 of my post – “Defining the Service owner role”, I penned about the need for service centric roles in IT organizations and some of the common misconceptions with respect to the service owner role. The reasons for these misconceptions need to be looked into.

Why there are misconceptions?

Why is it so painful to determine Service owner for a Service? Here are couple of reasons I could think of:

a)  This role has been largely missed in the ITIL literature to date. No guidelines were available on choosing a service stakeholder as a service owner.
b)  Services are being viewed as IT systems or at component level (applications, Server, Network, etc) that definitely have owners associated with it. Many IT centric organizations have application owner and asset owners in place.
c) The service owner role cannot be hard-coded as there are no pre-defined rules for selecting a service owner based on some set of activities he is responsible for. The level of ownership varies based on scenarios.What is right?
Following are my viewpoints around choosing service roles based on specific pattern of activities performed by these roles: Business Customer: Purchases the service for consumption by End-users. They often need service offerings (e.g. Service Catalog) from the IT to choose the right level of service they need.Business Relationship (Engagement) manager: Liaise with business & technology to translate strategic objectives to project and support requirements & vice-versa. Obtain funding and alignment from business on key IT initiatives and projects. This role is actively involved in defining IT strategy inline with the Business strategy. 

Service owner: Accountable for delivering the service consistently in accordance with the business requirements and the service design. Service owner role is not directly responsible for people or Budget. Service Owner owns a portfolio of services and manages them throughout their entire lifecycle – service inception to service retirement. Service owners should have the visibility on service pipeline (services that are being planned and built) & services in production.

Service ownership can be defined at a lower atomic level (e.g. Server, application, etc.) or a higher bundle level (e.g. Data center, Production support, etc.) At higher level, various types of atomic services interact together to form a Service bundle (or portfolio) aligned to customer’s business needs. The service owner role that owns a super set of services from a strategic perspective can be called as Service Manager.

 Service owners do not represent the provider side of Service delivery, but are more aligned to the customer / business side of delivery. Service owners work with atomic service owners and service delivery managers (see below) to standardize and productize services and catalog the service offering.


Once the service offering is cataloged, they work with the Relationship mangers to “expose” the services to business customers and help them choose the right level of service they want. In this role service owner act more both like a product manager as well as a marketing manager. Once the service views are exposed to customers, the service owners work with delivery managers and SLAs managers to ensure the quality of services delivered to the customers.


The service owner role that owns a super set of services from a strategic perspective can be called as Service Manager. For example, the head of Datacenter operations can be a Service Manager to whom the individual service owners (eg: Server management, Application management, etc.)