The Service Owner is accountable for the long-term strategic alignment of a service with the university’s mission, emerging needs, and risk landscape. This role ensures the service remains sustainable, relevant, and well-supported over time—regardless of where the supporting technologies or resources reside across the institution.

While the Service Delivery Manager (SDM) leads day-to-day operations, the Service Owner sets direction, confirms alignment with institutional priorities, and intervenes when risks or structural barriers exceed operational control. This role plays a critical part in future planning, investment advocacy, and cross-organizational coordination, especially where service delivery spans units, partners, or campuses.

This resource may be a functional business leader, a CIT representative, or a distributed unit IT lead—depending on where strategic accountability for the service resides.

Service Owner Responsibilities

• Maintains a 3–5-year strategic roadmap for the service in alignment with university priorities and evolving academic, administrative, or research needs.
• Monitors for long-term resourcing gaps, advocating for staffing, funding, or tooling adjustments based on capacity, complexity, and future demand.
• Acts as the escalation point for the Service Delivery Manager when risks arise related to compliance, security, cost, staffing shortages, reputational concerns, audit findings, or executive-level impact.
• Oversees the distribution of support responsibilities across units or campuses and ensures appropriate organizational coordination is in place.
• Validates that the Service Delivery Manager has clearly documented and aligned expectations for operational performance, in accordance with the university mission and strategy.
• Does not oversee daily operations, but is accountable when service expectations are unmet or when remediation requires decisions or actions beyond the Service Delivery Manager's authority.
• Provides strategic input into organizational change management efforts, especially when services are impacted by structural realignments, VP-level initiatives, or enterprise transitions.
• Participates in reviews of service-level expectations (SLEs) and service-level agreements (SLAs) to ensure delivery commitments are realistic and support institutional goals.
• Approves any business-impacting changes to the service or service offerings, especially those requiring redefinition of value, risk tolerance, or service scope.
• Ensures the service undergoes business impact analysis to inform support tier, preparedness planning, and risk mitigation strategy.
• May serve as Service Owner in a functional or central capacity, depending on whether the service is core to the university or delegated to CIT for operational execution.
• Is accountable for reviewing and accepting/rejecting costs, risks, and liabilities related to vendors, technologies, and support. It is advisable that a Sr. Leader be appointed to fulfill the role (In CIT the service owner is at the Director level). While individual tasks may be delegated by the service owner to other staff, the role itself cannot be delegated due to the stewardship required of university resources.

Additional responsibilities may be outlined in the service’s SLE and other governance agreements if committees exist for overseeing the service lifecycle.