Service Owners

Some services do not belong to one person. A server, a shared device, infrastructure at a location or a centrally managed workplace service is usually looked after by a team rather than an individual.

For these cases you can assign service ownership to an organizational group instead of a specific employee. Responsibility then follows the team, not a name that has to be updated whenever someone changes role.

Assign a group as Service Owner

The assigned group appears under Service owner in the assignment details of the service instance.

Asset details showing the assigned Service Owner group under Assignment details.

How Service Owner access works

Assigning a group does not automatically give every member of that group additional access.

An employee receives Service Owner access only when both conditions are met:

1. The employee is a member of the assigned Service Owner group.
2. The employee has the Service Business Owner role.

The role has to be assigned separately. Selecting a group as Service Owner does not grant it.

This separation lets you record which team is responsible for a service without widening permissions for everyone on that team.

What a Service Owner sees

Employees who meet both requirements find the relevant services in their Inventory, even when those services are not assigned to them personally.

Inventory view showing the services available to an authorized Service Owner.

Set a default Service Owner in the Service Portfolio

If a product should always end up with the same responsible team, you can configure this once on the product instead of after every order.

Product details include a Responsibilities section. Under Service owner, select the group that should become responsible for future service instances created from that product. When the product is ordered and a new instance is created, the group is carried over automatically.

Service Portfolio product with Management and Service Owner groups configured under Responsibilities.

Management and Service owner are not the same thing

The two fields under Responsibilities do different jobs:

• Management determines which group may manage the product in the Service Portfolio.
• Service owner determines which group is assigned as Service Owner when a service instance is created from the product.

They can point to the same group, but they do not have to.

Availability

Service Owner assignment through groups is available in customer environments, including managed and standalone customer environments. It is not available in supplier environments.