The Executive IT Ownership Checklist

Five checks a COO or CFO can run this week.

No technical knowledge required. Each check takes minutes, and each one surfaces the same underlying question: does anyone own this outcome, or only fragments of it? Answers that start with “I think…” are the findings.

01

Name the owner of each area — from memory.

Support, security, Microsoft 365, devices, networks, vendors. For each: who is the single accountable owner? Not “the MSP” — a name. If two leaders in the room give different answers, that area is unowned.

Finding: areas with zero or two owners
02

Pull the last five “resolved” tickets.

For each one, ask: was the cause fixed, or the symptom cleared? A password reset is a symptom; asking why lockouts spiked is a cause. Five symptoms in a row means your provider runs a queue, not an operation.

Finding: recurring issues with no root-cause task
03

Time your last onboarding.

How many days from start date until the new hire had laptop, accounts, and correct access — fully, without follow-ups? Ask HR and the hiring manager separately. The gap between their answers is the process.

Finding: no single owner of “ready on day one”
04

Ask for the renewal calendar.

Licenses, hardware refresh, contracts, domains, certificates. Does a single forward-looking calendar exist — or do renewals surprise finance? If it does not exist, next year's surprises are already scheduled.

Finding: renewals discovered at invoice time
05

Ask what happened to the last security alert.

Who saw it, who investigated, who decided, and where is that written down? Then one more: when was a backup last restored — actually restored, not “the job ran.” Both answers should be specific and boring.

Finding: alerts and backups nobody owns

Scoring

5 clean answers: your IT has real ownership — rare and worth protecting. 3–4: typical for a growing company; the gaps are fixable with standards and a named owner per area. 0–2: your next incident is already in motion; ownership, not tooling, is the fix.

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