The IT Skeptic has a great blog post about discrepancies in the Service Transition and Service Design books about the definition of a Service Owner.  I love ITIL, but I’ll definitely agree it’s not perfect.  If you’d like to read the post (which I suggest you do) here’s the link:  http://www.itskeptic.org/about-itil-service-owner.  Once again I’ll ask the question, how does this affect me at my job?  Since my organization isn’t too far into ITIL getting into specifics between Service Manager and Service Owner really doesn’t matter.  So from my point of view, and to keep things simple, I tend to think that the Service Manager is the person responsible for the service, i.e. works with the Service during its entire lifecycle.  The Service Owner is the person that faces the business and is accountable for its availability.  In other words, if a Service fails the Manager is responsible (remember RACI?) and the Owner is accountable.  To me, this means that a Service Owner is going to be high in the I.T. leadership, maybe even possibly the CIO or CTO, while a Service Manager is more of a Technical Function and works to maintain the Service.  I could be completely wrong with this simplistic interpretation but it’s probably the best one that will work within my environment (if we ever get there) and will be the easiest for my coworkers to grasp.  As far as what ITIL says; maybe the V3 refresh corrected the definitions across all of the books.

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Started working in IT in 1999 as a support desk analyst as a way to help pay for food during college. Studied Electrical Engineering for two years before realizing biochemistry was more fun than differential equations, and so ultimately graduated with a Biology degree in 2006. Having (reluctantly) failed at getting accepted into dental school, embraced working in IT and has gone broke becoming an ITIL Expert. Likes to jog, sing camp songs, quote Mel Brooks movie lines and make dumb jokes and loves working for an Israeli tech company where December 25th is a regular work day.