Understand Application Management Roles and Responsibilities

This chapter introduces the roles and organizations involved in managing an individual Application, how they relate to one another, and what it means to establish and document them.

The Application Management Roles

The following roles are the core of Application Management for any individual Application. They are common roles that IF4IT recommends; enterprises can rename or extend them to fit their own organizational vocabulary, provided each responsibility remains clearly assigned.

The Business Application Owner and the IT Application Owner are referred to collectively as an Application’s Application Owners.

The Associated Organizations

Three organizations are associated with these roles:

• The Application Management Organization is the organization, or organizational unit, to which the Application Manager belongs and which is accountable for the Application’s day-to-day operation, including work performed on its behalf by other organizations or vendors. It may be a sub-organization within the broader business organization the Application serves.

• The Development or Engineering Organization is the organization that designs, builds, and changes the Application.

• The Operations and Support Team(s) are the teams that run and support the Application’s Instances in Production.

How the Roles Fit Together

A typical chain of accountability looks like this. The head of a business area, such as Sales, owns that area’s Application Portfolio and is often the Business Application Owner of the Applications within it. The Business Application Owner sets each Application’s strategy and holds ultimate accountability for it. An Application Manager runs each Application day to day on the Business Application Owner’s behalf. The IT Application Owner is accountable for the Application’s technical design and engineering, carried out by the Development or Engineering Organization. The Operations and Support Team(s) run and support it in Production. SMEs provide expertise others depend on.

A Business Application Owner typically owns many Applications, and an Application Manager may manage one Application or several.

One Person May Hold Several Roles

One person may hold several of these roles where it makes sense; in smaller enterprises, this is common. For an Application whose primary users are within IT, such as an internal IT tool, the IT Application Owner is commonly the same person as the Business Application Owner. The IT Application Owner and the Application Manager are also frequently the same person. Even so, each role should be recorded explicitly and separately, so that the responsibilities remain visible and can be reassigned independently if circumstances change.

A Note on “Product Owner” and “Product Manager”

In this document, “Product Owner” means the Business Application Owner, and “Product Manager” means the Application Manager: just as a Product Manager works on behalf of a Product Owner, an Application Manager works on behalf of the Business Application Owner. In teams that use Scrum, the Scrum Product Owner is a team-level role that works on the Business Application Owner’s behalf and is often filled by the Application Manager or a delegate.

Documented Contacts That Are Not Application Management Roles

Some contacts are important to record when they are known, but they are not Application Management roles defined by this document. They include Data Owners, Security Owners, and Executive Sponsors, addressed in the chapter “Document Other Known Contacts — Data Owners, Security Owners, and Executive Sponsors.” Similarly, governance bodies and leaders, such as the Chief Information Officer (CIO), the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Enterprise Architecture, and a Change Review Board, govern Applications but are not roles assigned to an individual Application; they are addressed in the chapter “Connect Application Management to Enterprise Architecture and Change Governance.”

What It Means to Establish and Document a Role

Most of the chapters that follow address one role or group of roles under a title beginning “Establish and Document.” For a role, establishing and documenting it means four things:

9. Identify who currently holds, or should hold, the role.

10. Ensure the role is assigned by the right authority. The person documenting the Application often does not have the authority to assign a role. Establishing a role therefore means making sure the person or body with that authority actually makes the assignment, and escalating if it does not, rather than assigning it oneself.

11. Document the role holder in the Application Documentation.

12. Register the role holder in the Application Record in the Application Inventory.

A role that cannot be filled is an accountability gap. It should be recorded as a Knowledge Debt Item and as a Risk, reported as Red in documentation conformance reporting, and escalated until it is filled.

Best Practice: Recognize Every Application Management Role and Assign Each One Explicitly

Adopt a defined set of Application Management roles, such as those in this chapter, and require that every role be explicitly assigned and recorded for every Application, even when one person holds several of them.

Benefits: A shared set of roles gives every Application the same answer to the question “who is responsible for what?”, so that no one has to discover an Application’s accountability structure from scratch. Recording each role separately, even when one person holds several, keeps every responsibility visible, so that none is silently dropped when that person moves on.

Connections to Related IF4IT Practices and Inventories

The Application Portfolio Management (APM) Best Practices addresses Application ownership across the portfolio, including assigning a named Application Owner to every Application in the portfolio. The Applications Inventory and Attributes describes the ownership and stakeholder attributes recorded for each Application.