Service Custodian

A Service Custodian owns the management and governance responsibilities of one or more specific services. These duties do not just revolve around the extension and expansion and maintenance of service logic, but also include having to protect the integrity of the service context and its associated functional boundary.

Service Custodians are important to the evolution of agnostic services. Their involvement ensures that no one project team inadvertently skews the design of an agnostic service in favor of specific or single-purpose requirements. They are furthermore responsible for hiding non-essential information about service designs from the outside world (as per the access control levels established by the Service Abstraction principle). As a result, Service Custodians often require a good amount of authority.

Note also that depending on how service details are documented, a Service Custodian may author, own, and maintain a service’s corresponding service profile document.

Figure 1 – Even though a Service Custodian can take ownership of a service as early as when its context is first defined (and verified) during the Service-Oriented Analysis stage, they are typically assigned custodianship upon delivery of the implemented service by the development team.