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Ownership & accountability

The EA problem

A repository full of unowned assets is a museum, not a management tool. Accountability is what turns a diagram into a decision — but "owner" is ambiguous. The person accountable for an application's roadmap and technical health (a product owner) is rarely the person accountable for the business value it delivers (a business owner). Conflate them and you ask the wrong person the wrong question. Worse, if ownership is buried in a free-text property, you can't report on it.

How ArcaMira addresses it

Owner is a first-class attribute, not a buried property — so "show me everything owned by X" is a real query, and the basis for ownership reporting that can feed other tooling.

Owner means different things by layer, deliberately:

Entity owner means Why
Application Product owner The asset-level accountable person — roadmap, technical health.
Technology Product owner The platform/component accountable owner.
Capability Business owner Business ownership belongs to the business function, not the system.

An application's business owner is derived, not stored. It flows from the business owner of the capabilities the application realises, shown read-only on the application page — e.g. "Business owner: Priya Anand (eCommerce & Digital), Marco Reyes (Omnichannel Experience)." One source of truth (the capability), no duplication, and it reinforces "map your app to a capability and meaning follows."

Surfacing the gaps. The Estate Health page has a no-owner section with inline owner assignment — assign an owner without leaving the page, and the asset drops off the list. See Estate health.

What good looks like

  • Every active application and critical technology has a named product owner.
  • Every capability has a named business owner — so applications inherit a credible business owner automatically.
  • The no-owner count on Estate Health trends toward zero.
  • Ownership reporting can answer "who owns our T1 estate?" without a spreadsheet join.

Where ArcaMira draws the line

ArcaMira records who is accountable and an architect's judgement of criticality. It does not:

  • Survey owners to self-rate business criticality (always inflated) or technical quality (drifts into operational metrics like incidents/MTTR/SLA).
  • Conduct a Business Impact Analysis — that's a BCP/operational-risk discipline. ArcaMira consumes a criticality verdict (architect-set or imported); it doesn't conduct the analysis.

This is the operational divide: stay on the architecture side. A Gartner-style TIME survey was considered and deliberately declined for the core product for exactly this reason (it remains a possible future optional BIA module).