paper -
57 Service Owners - A partnership between systems and user services
Pamela
Vogel, Brown University
John Spadaro, Brown University
This paper is a review of how the concept of service
owners was conceived and how it played out in the realm of email services. It
is a model for how "marketing" and "engineering" can work
together to meet customer needs. Anyone who works in an environment where user
services sets all the rules, or where systems rules the roost, can learn from
our experience in forming cross-functional teams.
Within user services at Brown, we have long had a
model we called package owners: individuals who were responsible for support
and decision making about software. However, we saw the flaw in using that as
our only support model as we started to look at upgrading our various services.
For example, ownership of Eudora did not indicate that the person would look at
email needs overall. The concept of service owners, a person within user
services responsible for assessing user needs and leading projects to meet
those needs, was introduced to ensure that our services were kept up to date.
On the systems side, there had long been a person responsible for a particular
service; while all systems people took shifts "on call," a single
person was responsible for upgrading and keeping up with the available
technology for a service. Service owners from user services would be paired,
then, with a person from systems who was responsible for the systems aspects.
The first attempt to use this new model was in email services. The need to take action was high: we had implemented POP in 1991, and since then, the only thing that had changed was the version of Eudora we supported. The process by which we assessed needs and launched projects to meet those needs will also be covered.