business owner
163514·updated Aug 30, 2026An organizational role (not a job title) assigned to a senior official who holds accountability for one or more missions, business functions, or business processes that one or more information systems are built to support. In the NIST Risk Management Framework, the business owner is responsible for defining the mission and business functions and processes that a system is intended to support, and assists in developing organization-wide tailored control baselines. Mission or business owners coordinate with authorizing officials, system owners, and security and privacy officers to ensure that security and privacy requirements flow into organizational procurements and acquisitions. In practice the role is used to anchor risk decisions to organizational impact — the business owner is the party who can articulate what harm to the supported mission or function actually means in operational and strategic terms, and who therefore participates in risk acceptance alongside (but distinctly from) the system owner and authorizing official.
Source
to the system to cause harm or that adversaries will cause harm through them. Close coordination among mission and business owners, system administrators, human resource managers, andthe sentence this term was read in
generalized from a web lookup of the quoted expression at proposal time Verdict: term of art.
- • MISSION OR BUSINESS FOCUS, TASK P-8 | NIST SP 800-37
- NIST Special Publication 800-39 Managing Information Security Risk
- NIST SP 800-100, Information Security Handbook
A definition generalized from search results is a draft to react to, not provenance. Confirm it against an authority document before this term is verified.
A web lookup ran when this term was proposed
An organizational accountability role — typically held by a senior manager or executive — who bears primary responsibility for a mission or business function and, by extension, for the outcomes, risks, and resource decisions associated with the information systems that support that function. Distinguished from a system owner (who is accountable for a specific system) or a data owner (who classifies and governs a dataset), the business owner operates at the mission/business-process tier of enterprise governance: organizational missions and business functions influence the design and development of processes that carry them out, and the prioritization of those functions drives investment strategies, funding decisions, resource prioritization, and risk decisions. In practice, mission/business owners are among the roles to whom risk management decisions may be delegated, alongside systems and security engineers, enterprise architects, and authorizing officials. They are expected to coordinate closely with security, IT, and HR functions to ensure that the systems serving their mission areas are appropriately secured and that residual risk aligns with mission requirements — as reflected in working closely with program managers, the senior agency information security officer, and the business owners to ensure that all technical architecture requirements are adequately addressed.
Advisory only. A term this product ships is defined by an authority document, not by a search result.
Proposed during multiword review of this document in the CKI mapping queue.
Attested in
Classifications
Entity Type
Sensitivity
Information Class
Variants
- plural
- business owners
- possessive
- business owner's
- pluralpossessive
- business owners'
Framework definitions
- §1 · attested_usage_reviewer_confirmed
- No definition is given in NIST SP 800-171r3. The term is attested in use at 2 citations in that document; a definition is pending curation.Increment 2: attested in 800-171r3 without a glossary definition.
- §1 · web_lookup_draft
- An organizational role (not a job title) assigned to a senior official who holds accountability for one or more missions, business functions, or business processes that one or more information systems are built to support. In the NIST Risk Management Framework, the business owner is responsible for defining the mission and business functions and processes that a system is intended to support, and assists in developing organization-wide tailored control baselines. Mission or business owners coordinate with authorizing officials, system owners, and security and privacy officers to ensure that security and privacy requirements flow into organizational procurements and acquisitions. In practice the role is used to anchor risk decisions to organizational impact — the business owner is the party who can articulate what harm to the supported mission or function actually means in operational and strategic terms, and who therefore participates in risk acceptance alongside (but distinctly from) the system owner and authorizing official.DR-088 backfill from the noun definition column
- §1 · web_lookup_draft
- An organizational accountability role — typically held by a senior manager or executive — who bears primary responsibility for a mission or business function and, by extension, for the outcomes, risks, and resource decisions associated with the information systems that support that function. Distinguished from a system owner (who is accountable for a specific system) or a data owner (who classifies and governs a dataset), the business owner operates at the mission/business-process tier of enterprise governance: organizational missions and business functions influence the design and development of processes that carry them out, and the prioritization of those functions drives investment strategies, funding decisions, resource prioritization, and risk decisions. In practice, mission/business owners are among the roles to whom risk management decisions may be delegated, alongside systems and security engineers, enterprise architects, and authorizing officials. They are expected to coordinate closely with security, IT, and HR functions to ensure that the systems serving their mission areas are appropriately secured and that residual risk aligns with mission requirements — as reflected in working closely with program managers, the senior agency information security officer, and the business owners to ensure that all technical architecture requirements are adequately addressed.Drafted by the propose-term web lookup (PD-018); a curator confirms or replaces it.