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.
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
A named governance role assigned to the individual or organizational unit that has primary accountability for a mission or business function and for the information systems that directly support it. Distinguished from technical roles such as system owner or system security officer, the business owner operates at the mission/business-process tier of risk management — articulating operational requirements, setting risk tolerance for the supported function, and ensuring that security and privacy controls remain aligned with mission needs throughout the system life cycle. In NIST guidance, mission or business owners appear alongside system owners and information owners/stewards among those with "security and privacy implementation and operations responsibilities," and the NIST RMF Roles and Responsibilities Crosswalk treats "Mission or Business Owner" as a discrete, enumerated role — distinct from, though often coordinating with, the authorizing official, the CIO, and system-level roles. In practice, the business owner is engaged by other governance actors — such as the enterprise architect and the senior information security officer — to ensure that technical architecture requirements
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