The System Owner Nobody Appointed
Every digital asset an organisation buys ends up somewhere on a register. A licence, a platform, a piece of software with a dollar value and a depreciation schedule. Accounting does its job correctly here — it records the asset, tracks its value, decides when it’s written off. That’s not the problem. That’s accounting doing exactly what accounting is for.
The problem is what happens after the asset is recorded. Because recording an asset and owning an asset are not the same act, and most organisations quietly let the first one substitute for the second.
A digital asset sitting on a balance sheet doesn’t train anyone to use it. It doesn’t notice when the data inside it goes stale, or when staff have drifted back to spreadsheets because the “real” system became too much friction. It doesn’t ask whether the version running is current, or whether it talks to the other systems it should be talking to. An accounting entry has no opinion on any of this. It was never built to.
That’s the gap. Your organisation has a clear answer for who owns the value of a digital asset. It rarely has a clear answer for who owns the use of it.
What System Ownership Actually Covers
If you strip the title down to what it should mean operationally, the System Owner role carries distinct categories of responsibility — not a vague mandate to “look after the system.”
Training and induction. New staff arrive and inherit a system nobody walks them through properly. The System Owner is responsible for closing that gap — not IT, who supports the infrastructure, not Accounting, who records the cost.
Data and process hygiene. Keeping the asset clean. Current data, current processes, running on the latest stable version rather than three patches behind because nobody owns the decision to upgrade.
Integration. Making sure the asset talks to the other digital systems around it, rather than becoming an island that someone reconciles manually every month.
Continuous improvement. Enhancements don’t happen by accident. Someone has to own the backlog of “this could work better” and actually act on it, instead of letting it become folklore — the thing everyone complains about and nobody fixes.
Governance. Underneath all of it — making sure staff are using the asset the way it was intended to be used, not the way they’ve drifted into using it because that was easier six months ago.
None of this is IT’s job in the way most organisations assume. ICT manages and supports the infrastructure. That’s a different function from owning how the asset is used, by whom, and to what standard.
Why This Matters More Than the Accounting Entry
The cost of an unowned digital asset never shows up as a line item. It shows up as duplicated effort, as staff working around the system instead of through it, as data nobody trusts enough to report on, as a platform that was current two upgrades ago. The accounting register stays accurate the entire time. The asset’s actual value to the organisation quietly erodes underneath it.
This is the same drift I write about constantly, just at a different layer. The report stays green. The asset stays “in service.” And the gap between what was paid for and what is actually being used grows wider, unnoticed, because nobody was ever made accountable for closing it.
Your organisation almost certainly has clarity on who owns the financial record of every digital asset. Ask yourself the harder question: who owns whether it’s actually being used the way it was meant to be.
