In short: Each application is linked to one or more Owners, as well as to Contributors. You know who steers each application, you spot the ones without a steward, and you analyze your portfolio through the person in charge of it.
What Owners and Contributors are for
A governance decision only has value if someone carries it. As long as an application has no identified owner, no one is in a position to decide its future, answer security questions, or steer its usage.
The ownership model links each application to named people, not to abstract domains or teams. This addresses concrete needs:
Clear accountability: for every application, you know who to talk to. Decisions and actions have an identified owner.
No application without a steward: applications with no owner are highlighted, so that you can assign one to them.
Analysis by owner: you enter your portfolio analysis through the person in charge of it, not only by category or by domain.
Owner and Contributor
Owner: the person or people who carry the application. An application can have several Owners (multi-select).
Contributor: secondary stakeholders, associated with the application without being responsible for it.
Applications with no owner carry an Orphan label, which lets you filter them and address the gaps.
Assigning Owners and Contributors
Individually or in bulk: assign Owners and Contributors to a single application or to a selection, from the Apps Inventory, the Prioritization Matrix and the Dimension Sheets.
From the Product Sheet: an application's ownership can be viewed and updated from its Product Sheet.
Dedicated columns: the Owner and Contributors columns are available in all of the platform's tables, for sorting and filtering.
Analyzing your portfolio by owner
Tech Sheets can be viewed by Owner: you analyze a person's perimeter the way you would analyze a functional perimeter, with the applications they carry and their usage metrics. This makes it easy to hand each steward the exact list of applications under their responsibility.
A concrete example
An Enterprise Architect filters the Apps Inventory on the Orphan label and identifies 40 applications with no owner. They assign the Owners in bulk from the table, based on the domains concerned. They then open one Tech Sheet per Owner to hand each steward the list of applications now under their responsibility, along with their usage metrics.