Tool · Team · Trustee: A Simple Model for Ownership in Complex SaaS Environments

Modern systems are complicated.

The technology stack is deep, the number of SaaS tools keeps growing, and each platform has multiple modules, features, and integrations that all touch security and compliance in different ways.

But underneath all of that complexity, it is still people and teams that make security and compliance work.

The hard question usually isn’t “what does this tool do?” It’s:

“Who actually owns this tool, and who owns each function of it?”

Org charts and RACI matrices help, but they often blur three very different things:

• Who funds the tool and sets direction
• Who actually configures and operates it
• How that maps back to security and GRC responsibilities

To cut through that noise, I’ve been using a simple mental model:

Tool · Team · Trustee

It’s a lightweight way to describe ownership and accountability for tools and the functions they support, especially in SaaS-heavy environments.

Why ownership gets messy

If you’ve tried to assign “tool owners” in a real organization, you’ve probably seen at least one of these patterns:

• A tool is funded by one group, configured by another, and used by five more
• Different modules inside the same SaaS are effectively owned by different parts of the business
• No one is quite sure who is supposed to answer the hard questions when something breaks or when an auditor shows up

This shows up in conversations like:

• “Is this a Security tool or an IT tool?”
• “Does Engineering or Product own that dashboard?”
• “Who can actually change this policy?”

The result is predictable: slow decisions, unclear escalation paths, and a lot of time spent chasing the “right” stakeholder.

Tool · Team · Trustee doesn’t solve your org design, but it gives you a clear way to talk about ownership that maps to how tools are actually used.

The Tool · Team · Trustee model

For every meaningful tool or capability, you should be able to answer three questions:

1. What is the Tool?
2. Which Team owns it?
3. Who are the Trustees?

If you can’t fill in all three, you don’t really have ownership; you have good intentions.

1. Tool: where the capability lives

The Tool is the system that implements or supports a capability in your environment. That capability might span multiple controls and processes.

Examples:

• Microsoft Entra ID for workforce identity
• Duo for MFA
• Salesforce for customer data and workflows
• Jira or ServiceNow for change and incident management
• Your internal applications and services
• A log platform or SIEM
• A CI/CD pipeline or deployment orchestrator

For a given capability, you might have multiple tools in play. That’s fine. The point is to name the ones that matter most for enforcing security policy, creating or storing evidence, and driving day-to-day operational behavior.

2. Team: who funds and is accountable

The Team is the business owner of the tool and the capability it supports.

This is usually a director- or senior-manager-level leader who:

• Owns or influences the budget for the tool
• Sets requirements and prioritization
• Accepts or challenges risk
• Is accountable for outcomes when things go wrong

Examples:

• Director of IT / Corporate Engineering for workforce identity
• Director of Platform or Cloud Engineering for infrastructure tooling
• Head of Security Operations for detection/response platforms
• VP of Product for a critical customer-facing app

Your mapping should still identify a single primary Team for each tool or capability. When something critical happens, or when you’re debating risk, someone has to be clearly on the hook.

3. Trustee: who actually runs it

The Trustee is the resource (or set of resources) that directly administers and operates the tool.

Trustees:

• Configure and maintain the tool
• Implement policy changes and rule updates
• Maintain integrations and automations
• Generate and export evidence for audits

Examples:

• An Entra admin on the IT team
• A security engineer responsible for SIEM tuning
• A DevOps engineer maintaining CI/CD policies
• A Salesforce admin managing roles, fields, and data retention

In many SaaS platforms, there are multiple Trustees for different modules, integrations, or environments. Calling that out explicitly is the whole point of the model.

How this helps GRC and security

On paper, Tool · Team · Trustee is just three fields. In practice, it simplifies a lot.

1. It makes ownership concrete

Instead of arguing over a RACI row, you can ask:

• What is the Tool in question?
• Which Team is accountable for how we use it?
• Who are the Trustees that actually operate it?

You can capture this in a simple table or catalog and review it like any other asset inventory.

2. It surfaces misalignment early

If the Trustees sit three org layers away from the Team that is supposedly accountable, that’s a signal:

• Do they have the same view of priorities and risk?
• Do Trustees have the access and capacity they need?
• Are we asking the right people to join design reviews and incident calls?

3. It plugs directly into GRC workflows

When you map tools into your GRC program, you can extend your control catalog with:

• Tool (or tool set) per control or control family
• Team for each tool/capability
• Trustee roles or groups

Now, when you run a risk assessment, open a remediation ticket, or prepare for an audit, you know exactly which Team to engage and which Trustees can actually make the changes or pull the evidence.

4. It improves response to incidents and audits

When something breaks or an auditor asks a difficult question:

• Tool tells you where to look and where to pull logs/configs
• Team tells you who joins the risk conversation and sign-off
• Trustees tell you who can actually execute the fix or produce evidence

Concrete examples

Example 1: Workforce identity

• Tool: Microsoft Entra ID + Duo
• Team: Corporate IT (Director of IT)
• Trustees: Entra/Duo admins in IT; a security engineer responsible for MFA and conditional access policies

Example 2: Change and release management

• Tool: Jira + CI/CD pipeline
• Team: Engineering leadership (Director/VP of Engineering)
• Trustees: DevOps engineers who maintain the pipeline, required checks, and release rules

Example 3: Customer-facing SaaS platform

• Tool: Salesforce (core CRM + Service Cloud)
• Team: Revenue Operations (VP of Sales Ops or RevOps)
• Trustees: Salesforce admin team, plus a data engineering function handling integrations

Implementing Tool · Team · Trustee in your environment

1. List your critical tools and capabilities
   Start with a short list: identity and access, change management and CI/CD, logging and monitoring, vulnerability management, and customer-facing SaaS where security/compliance is high-stakes.
2. Add three fields to your catalog
   In whatever system you use, add Tool, Team, and Trustee for each item.
3. Review with stakeholders
   Confirm with the Team leader and Trustees that the mapping reflects reality and adjust where responsibilities are split or unclear.
4. Wire it into your processes
   Use Tool · Team · Trustee in risk registers, remediation tracking, onboarding of new tools, and audit prep.
5. Tie it into automation and AI if you have it
   Use Tool for integration targets, Team for approvals and risk decisions, and Trustees for execution and technical ownership.

Closing thought

Tool · Team · Trustee is intentionally simple.

The goal is not to create another layer of bureaucracy, but to give everyone a shared language for ownership in environments where tools are shared, functions are split, and security and compliance responsibilities are distributed.

If you can answer, for each important tool:

• What is the Tool?
• Which Team owns it?
• Who are the Trustees operating it?

...you’re already ahead of most organizations that are still arguing over who “really” owns what.

If you try this mapping in your environment, pay attention to what breaks first: unclear Teams, missing Trustees, or tools that nobody wants to claim. That’s usually where the most interesting work is.