I have been on both the customer and the vendor side of Application Management over the last decade. So, I was surprised how much trouble my team and I had really defining the Application Owner as a sales target. With our collective backgrounds, I expected it to be a breeze. Of course the CxOs, VP Operations, and others are well know entities. So why is the application owner so difficult to find? One reason is because the definitions are all over the place.
For example, one definition on the IT Law Wiki says:
An application owner is the individual or group with the responsibility to ensure that the program or programs, which make up the application, accomplish the specified objective or set of user requirements established for that application, including appropriate security safeguards.
Snore… I could be in charge of Microsoft Office for my company and fit that technically focused, but inherently logical, definition. NIST has a similarly technically oriented definition. Now in all seriousness, we can see that part of the problem is that I really mean a business application owner, not a technical owner. In that vein, a definition much more to my liking can be found on this blog entry from Nick Spanos on his Lean IT blog. In the spirit of lean methodology, he brings in business/customer…