University IT
Service Owner Role
What are the general responsibilities of a Service Owner?
A Service Owner is the leader accountable for a service's overall success and value. This is a strategic role focused on direction and oversight, not day-to-day support.
- Sets the Direction: Defines the service's purpose, strategy, and roadmap, and is ultimately accountable for its success and value to the university.
- Ensures Information Integrity: Is accountable for making sure all service information—including its official description, support guides, and request forms—is accurate, clear, and kept up-to-date.
- Manages Risk and Value: Oversees the service's budget, cost-recovery (if applicable), security, and compliance, ensuring it meets university standards and delivers value; reviews resiliency and infrastructure enhancements recommended through the UIT Criticality Assessment and determines financial feasibility, prioritization, and funding approach.
- Approves Major Changes: Reviews and approves significant changes, official communications, and manages key vendor relationships to advocate for improvements.
- Acts as the Final Escalation Point: Serves as the key contact for major outages and provides direction and resources to the Service Manager, who handles day-to-day operations.
The Service Owner and Service Manager roles are sometimes fulfilled by a single staff member. This is especially common for smaller services and for services that are delivered through cloud vendors (Platform-as-a-Service [PaaS] or Software-as-a-Service [SaaS]). In UIT, the role of Service Owner is frequently a director of the organization that owns the service.
What ServiceNow tasks is the Service Owner responsible for?
| Task | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| You provide guidance to the Service Manager to ensure a well-formed and complete service offering (Configuration Item or CI) is established in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). | Having your service offering name (CI) in the ServiceNow CMDB is foundational for receiving incident tickets, ensuring they are routed to the correct support groups, and managing change requests. |
| You approve the content, design, and presentation of the service request form in the ServiceNow Catalog. | A service catalog entry is necessary in order for your clients to order or request your service. |
| You review and approve service change requests at the level for which they are authorized. You ensure that change requests for your service follow the correct change process for their risk level, have the required technical and business approvals, and include appropriate customer and stakeholder communication before, during, and after implementation | Adhering to Change Management best practices minimizes the potential for service disruptions and outages. Even when you are not the final approver, your oversight ensures that high-impact and high-risk changes are properly reviewed, approved, and communicated. This prevents poorly governed changes from reaching production and reduces avoidable outages, customer confusion, and post-change incidents. |
| You serve as the point of escalation (notification) for major (Priority 1 and/or Priority 2) incidents. You are the key decision-maker during times of uncertainty. You are responsible for designating the appropriate personnel to collaborate with ITOC, ensuring that decisions are made swiftly and accurately. | The aim of the Major Incident Process is to quickly restore service with any means necessary, including workarounds. |
| You provide oversight and direction for Problem Management, including root cause analysis, confirming risk and impact, guiding the Service Manager on corrective-action prioritization, and ensuring fixes are tested and implemented. | RCA identifies underlying causes so corrective actions can be prioritized and completed, improving service stability and reducing repeat incidents. |
Key terms
- Change Management: The process responsible for controlling the lifecycle of all changes, enabling beneficial changes to be made with minimum disruption to IT services.
- Configuration Management Database (CMDB): The database in ServiceNow that holds information about the service including service name (CI), description, service role assignments, incident assignment tiers, and change approvers.
- Incident Management: An incident is an unplanned interruption or reduction in the quality of an IT service. Incident management is the process responsible for managing the lifecycle of all incidents. Incident management ensures that normal service operation is restored as quickly as possible and the business impact is minimized.
- Major (Priority 1) Incident: A widespread, serious, major interruption or outage of a critical service that must be resolved with great urgency. They are classified as Priority 1 and Priority 2 incident tickets. The aim of the Major Incident Process is to quickly restore service with any means necessary, including workarounds.
- Service Catalog: The only part of the ITIL Service Portfolio published to customers, used to support the sale and delivery of IT Services. The Service Catalog includes information about deliverables, prices, contact points, ordering, and request processes.
- Problem Management: A problem is the cause of one or more incidents. The primary objectives of problem management are to prevent problems and resulting incidents from happening, to eliminate recurring incidents, and to minimize the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented.
