What is a (Digital) Service Owner?
As part of my work in helping organisations become more ‘Digital’, I often have to explain to clients what different types of Digital specialist roles entail. In many cases client organisations won’t have had these roles before, or, if they have had them, their understanding of the role may be different from usual definitions.
I was asked recently by a client what a ‘service owner’ was, so wrote the definition below. They had people who owned stuff of course, but as in other clients I’ve worked with, the idea of having a single person responsible for the outcomes of a service was a new concept to them.
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A (Digital) Service Owner is a single person who’s accountable for the quality and outcomes of the service(s) they own. These services may consist of multiple products, across multiple channels — in some cases including non-Digital channels such as phone lines, post, or face-to-face interactions — basically the entirety of what it takes for the service to achieve its outcomes.
Service Owners need to be empowered by the organisation and trusted to make decisions about the services they own. They’ll make strategic choices about their service with people who govern — for example they will be given a long-term budget and headcount — but will largely be accountable for the service achieving its organisational outcomes and meeting its users’ needs within this agreement, especially for day-to-day decision-making.
Service Owners are often drawn from the ‘business’ side of an organisation. They have an outward look from their service — to understand organisational strategy and objectives and how their service(s) join up with other services. They also have to work with people who govern, such as delivery boards, sponsors, assurance teams — as well as with enabling teams such as Finance, HR, Commercial, IT etc. Over time they should build their Digital knowledge to understand the different disciplines that make up modern, multi-disciplinary Digital delivery.
It’s also important that service owners advocate for their users’ needs. Good services are built to meet the needs of their users and to achieve organisational objectives — but meeting organisational objectives is only possible through meeting user needs well — failure to meet user needs will result in a service that doesn’t achieve its outcomes, has a poor reputation and is costly to run.
Service owners also own the technology through which their service is realised (*). They must understand how to lead delivery, or at least lead it through their teams. They can’t just push requirements onto their teams with impunity though — if those teams can’t deliver due to workload or rapidly switching between priorities, and so outcomes aren’t being achieved, that’s the service owner’s problem.
For a bigger service a service owner will likely have a service team to support them, for example a programme delivery manager, a head of product, a head of design etc and will work with the various product teams that make up the service. For smaller services, they may just be leading a single delivery team and the role of service owner begins to blur with that of product manager. Either way, the service owner will need to work with their team to agree strategy for the service, delivery roadmaps and to effectively govern delivery of their service to achieve its outcomes.
(*) Not all technology. For example, some services may share use of common platforms such as shared CRMs. In this case there should be a service owner for the platform who collaborates with the owners of the services that use the platform to devise a platform development strategy, roadmap and funding to effectively support the services built on the platform.
References
Government Digital, Data and Technology role definition — service owner
Service Ownership at DfE — Create/Change helped establish DfE Digital and DfE’s Teacher Services Division.
(Short) Mark Dalgarno (Create/Change) talks about service ownership in Government — and the importance of multi-disciplinary service teams.
(Long) Mark Dalgarno (Create/Change) talk for the Cross-Government Delivery Community on Different Models of Service Ownership (in public sector).
Thanks
Thanks to Georgina Watts for reviewing a draft of this story.
