Dear DC-corporate friends,
would be interesting to share some experiences around "owner" as a DC agent in a corporate context

In our internal implementation of DC we in 2004 defined some responsibilities around information and documents such as responsibility for lifecycle management, access, and quality of metadata. The term 'owner' was used to describe the person(s) with these responsibilities.

The use of this term has been challenged:
*	The company owns the information, not an individual!
*	Perhaps concentrating these responsibilities into one role was too simple?
*	Responsibilities should be held by a role, not by a person!
*	How is concept of ownership related to emerging concepts such as stewardship, custodianship etc.?
*	How does the concept of ownership relate to the distinction between information as such (focus on the meaning, contents, abstracted from any concrete computer representation), and a specific instantiation (focus on a specific representation form, e.g. a database record, document, document part, etc.)? 

However 'owner' is one of our mandatory metadata elements. Content, or document, 'owner' is a very useful entity since it enables automatic reminders, e.g. re around retirement dates, for lifecycle management. 

What experiences and ideas have you related to this topic??

Kind regards

Kerstin Forsberg 
Principal Information Architect
Information Strategy, Clinical Information Science
AstraZeneca
KC5, S-431 83 Mölndal, Sweden
Phone: +46  31 7065318
Mob:   +46 708 467495
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