H.4.5 Ownership Failure

Ownership has failed when ordinary change or incident response cannot find accountable capacity.

• Detect orphaned code, unresponsive or overloaded owners, concentrated review, repeated reassignment, and stale records.
• Assign an owner of last resort for coordination without silently making a platform team maintain every domain.
• Provide escalation, temporary authority, stewardship transfer, archive, and retirement paths.
• Repair the record and the underlying responsibility or capacity problem; adding another name alone may preserve the failure.
• Track blocked time, abandoned code, repeated incidents, and post-review defects by affected area.