Process owner: The person responsible for the business process.
System owner: The person responsible for the availability, and maintenance of a computerised system and for the security of the data residing on that system.
Those are the two people the glossary of EU GMP Annex 11 defines, the rule for computerised systems in a drug plant. Section 2 asks for both, with defined responsibilities, for every system in scope. They’re roles. When the person holding one leaves, the role is still required, so it gets a new name, and the system goes on having an owner.
The system that doesn’t exist yet has no line in that glossary.
I’ve seen multiple million dollar projects dissolve because the person championing it left, despite the business still needing the systems.
Read that as two facts and they don’t fit. The need stayed. The project went. So the need was never what held the project up. A person was.
A champion holds two things. The first is the need, which belongs by definition to the process owner, and a project charter usually names a sponsor for it as well. Both are roles, and a role that empties gets refilled. The second is standing: the credibility to ask for a million dollars and keep asking as the budget rounds come back. Standing has no slot on an org chart. A person builds it, and it leaves in their car. The successor gets the title, the inbox, and the recurring meetings, and has to make the ask again from zero, without having been in the room for the first argument.
That’s why the verb is dissolve. A cancelled project has a decision behind it, somebody writing down that the need is gone. A dissolved one has no such line. The need is still a need. It has no one left who can be believed asking for the money.
In June I put the sponsor at the top of the list for a governance program. I’d still put it there. What I left out is that the sponsor is a single point of failure, and the fix for a single point of failure is a second one. For standing, that means a second person who could make the ask alone and be believed, and I don’t know how you arrange that on purpose. It isn’t a field on the charter.
The test I can offer is cheaper than the answer. For every project over a million, take the champion’s name off the business case and ask who else in the building could present it next quarter from the paper alone, and win. If the answer is no one, the system gets an owner the day it goes live and has none until then.
Annex 11 waits until there’s a system, then names the people. The window before that is where the money gets spent, and I’ve watched it close with the need still open.