Every Manager's Guide to Business Processes:

The concept of process owner being relatively new, examples in practice are few. What it implies is the matching of authority and accountability in a cross-functional environment. Three practical approaches include (1) assigning process ownership to an individual within the existing functional structure, (2) designating as process owner a senior corporate manager, and (3) organizing around business processes, with the process owner being equivalent to a line executive and vice versa. The first leaves the existing authority-accountability relationship intact and introduces a new role, a type of coordinator who must negotiate with the functional areas. The second approach coopts existing authority by transferring responsibility for a function to an individual who possesses organizational clout and can command, not just negotiate. The third approach supplants functional structure by developing authority and accountability around processes directly.

Each approach can be effective, but experience managing information technology in large organizations suggests some cautions. The corporate IT function is fundamentally cross-functional. Its service role defines its business responsibility, and its oversight role, explicitly or implicitly, defines its authority. The old data processing function exercised considerable authority; it was, in effect, a monopoly with the latitude to dictate procedure to captive business units. Business accountability, on the other hand, was practically nil, a source of continuing frustration for "users" (a designation that relegates business units to a lesser role than clients or colleagues of the IT function). Today, the pendulum has swung; the function is seen increasingly as a business service unit, and decision-making authority over planning priorities and resource allocation has devolved to business units. The diagram below suggests descriptors of the function at the extremes of low and high authority and accountability.

When the function is ceded little authority but held highly accountable, its managers tend to become whipping posts, expected to deliver ever-higher levels of service in the absence of power to ensure effective coordination of infrastructures, cross-functional resource sharing, and avoidance of multi-technology chaos. In the rare instances in which the function is neither granted authority nor held particularly accountable, it serves principally to operate corporate data centers, peripheral to the mainstream of business and to business units' use of IT. It is in this capacity that we refer to the function as an information janitor; with little expected of it and even less latitude to coordinate, it struggles to maintain some semblance of order within the corporate information resource and to clean up after the independent data centers operated by the business units. The function as monopolist has become an endangered species, an evolutionary dead end. The function's future is as information executive, a highly accountable role that possesses the authority to fulfill corporate and business unit expectations.

The descriptors used to characterize the IT function can also be applied to process owners. Conferring the title without a clear statement and metrics for measuring the business achievement is little more than an exercise in public relations, a token effort rather than a serious commitment. If authority remains with the functional unit, a designated process owner will be merely a process janitor. When total quality management became de rigueur for businesses a few years ago, many companies assigned junior staff to oversee quality across functions. These "advocates" published newsletters and spoke at conferences on quality, but their role was clearly temporary and evaporated over time. So will the role of process owners who lack ownership rights.

The creation of monopolist process owners is unlikely, but there exist many process monopolies, fiefdoms of administrative units, most often corporate groups, that tyrannize business operations via paper and control of resources. The process movements generally end such monopolies, either by increasing business responsibility, as by reengineering the travel expense, budgeting, or contract approval process, or by relocating authority, as by outsourcing the offending activities or substituting software systems for administrative functionaries.

Assigning process ownership to corporate managers already accorded ample authority and business responsibility effectively finesses many of the problems implicit in the monopolist and whipping post syndromes.