What does it mean to be responsible? Just to say it? Responsibility should be accompanied with fines corresponding to the damage or something like it. Otherwise those are just words. I'm responsible, but I'm not getting any fines if something goes wrong, so whatever, but I'm responsible. Fire me if you want, I'll find new work in a few days, but I was responsible.
It's business owner who's responsible, because ultimately he's getting all the expenses when critical event happens, client leaves, client sues the company, and so on. Other people are not really responsible, they just pretend to be.
So I've actually written about this in the past, but, responsibility is -actually effecting the entity-.
That is, "you're responsible for this" - if they do it, and it succeeds, what happens? If they don't do it, and it fails, what happens? If the answer is "nothing" in either of those cases, they're not actually responsible. If the result is too detached, they're also not actually responsible (i.e., if I decide not to do one of the ten tasks assigned to me, and I don't hear about it until review time, if at all, then I was never responsible).
Responsibility is innately tied with knowledge and empowerment, but without going on at length, and to just give an example - if I'm the one woken up by the pagerduty alarm when something breaks, I am responsible for that something, because its success or failure directly affects me. If, however, there is a separate ops team that has to deal with it, and I can slumber peacefully, responsibility has been diluted; you won't get as good a result.
It's business owner who's responsible, because ultimately he's getting all the expenses when critical event happens, client leaves, client sues the company, and so on. Other people are not really responsible, they just pretend to be.