Blade HQ

Aaron Porter

Business Systems Advisor

When talking about ownership of business technology, we often think in terms of who manages the system, who supports it, or which department uses it. Software, and the business using it, continues to evolve long after it’s implemented.

Then, who is responsible for making sure those changes don’t lead to missed opportunities?

Company A is a large multinational enterprise with over 1,000 SAP licenses across multiple departments, software architects, engineers, developers and more. They’ve made a conscious decision to wait to upgrade certain modules until their existing versions neared end of life. As they prepared for the upgrades, they discovered several custom features that would be incompatible with the upgrade and several new built-in features that could replace other customizations.

Company B is an upper midmarket company running Magento. No architects. Just developers and engineers, IT Managers, an IT Director, and the departments that use the software. IT and business managers meet regularly with their Magento representative to discuss upcoming changes (not necessarily at the same time). However, this doesn’t always lead to a clear picture of how the users will be affected by the changes.

Company C is an SMB/ mid-market e-commerce retailer operating a custom website maintained by in-house developers, while most of their other systems are hosted. It’s not always clear who owns the hosted systems, which sometimes results in a lack of awareness of capabilities that could benefit the company.

Each organization approached its technology differently, and for understandable reasons.

My experiences at these companies have led me to think about technology ownership differently. Asking “who owns the technology” doesn’t tell us who is responsible for ensuring the business continues to benefit from it. Rather than asking only who owns a system, I think we should be asking several other questions.

These questions are:

• Who maintains the relationships needed to understand and support the technology?

• Who keeps up with existing and emerging capabilities?

• Who recognizes opportunities to improve how the business uses the technology?

• Who has the authority to decide whether a capability should be adopted or a process changed?

• Who ensures employees have the knowledge and proficiency to use the technology effectively?

These are important questions regardless of the size of the company and whether, or not the company has a formal IT department.

It’s possible that one person fulfills all these responsibilities for a given system. It’s also possible they’re distributed across several people. Neither arrangement is inherently better, but when responsibilities are distributed, the relationships between those people become especially important. Regular conversations may be enough, with meetings called only when needed, establishing other communication channels to use when meetings aren’t needed. Watch out, though, shared responsibility may not answer the question of who makes the final decision.

What happens when everyone is fulfilling their responsibilities, but no one is responsible for connecting them? IT is maintaining the system, a business manager oversees its use, the vendor communicates product changes and employees receive training. Everyone is doing their job, but information about new capabilities may never reach the people who can recognize their value. Opportunities may be identified without decisions being made. Decisions may be made without employees developing the proficiency to act on them.

I don’t believe there’s a single ownership model that works for every organization. What matters is that the responsibilities are understood, the relationships between them are effective, and the authority to make decisions is clear. Assigning ownership of a system is a starting point, but it doesn’t ensure the business is realizing its value.

Perhaps the more important question isn’t simply who owns the technology the business uses, but whether you’ve established what it takes to make informed decisions about how the technology is used.