Duties & Responsibilities

The Service Owner is accountable for one or more services within the organization regardless of where the underpinning technology components or professional capabilities reside.

This accountability includes that the Service Owner takes care that their service(s) are defined in terms of functionality, scope, capacity, quality and costs in agreement with customer requirements as well as to make sure that continual assurance and improvement of service quality is in place.

He is involved in escalations as well serving as the primary and single point of contact for all customer requests regarding services within the Service Owner’s responsibility.

The Service Owner does not take over any responsibility from the (functional) Service Managers.

Tasks

The following tasks are assigned to the role of a Service Owner:

• Serving as a central point of contact for service customers across the organization
• Ensuring the service description in the Service Catalogue is accurate and kept up-to-date
• Ensuring continual communication with customers and users of their service(s)
• Serving as a point of escalation (notification) for major incidents
• Ensuring participation of representatives from the service provider organization in internal and external service review meetings
• Supporting negotiations of SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and OLAs (Operational Level Agreements)
• Organising and overseeing continual improvement activities and management of changes affecting the service
• Maintaining the entry in the Risk Register for the service in question

Skills, Experience & Knowledge

For a successful fulfilment of this role the the following skill set is recommended:

• Knowledge about service structures as well as technical and functional dependencies
• Communication skills and service-orientation to ensure long-term customer satisfaction and good relationship between service and customer organizations
• Experience in dealing with managers and scientists on all levels of the organization
• Basic account management skills
• Organization and communication skills to ensure continual coordination of internal and external staff responsible for service provision

Assignment

The Service Owner role should be assigned once per service. A person can however be Service Owner of more than one service. The assignment of one or more Service Owner Deputy(s) is highly recommended.