In general, when you create a RACF® profile, you become the owner of the profile unless you specify otherwise. You can choose to specify either a RACF group or a RACF-defined user ID:

• If you make a user the owner of the RACF profile, the user can modify, list, and delete the profile, or name another user to become the owner.
• If you make a group the owner of a RACF profile, you extend the scope of the group (and, in some cases, the scope of its superior groups) to the RACF profile. If users have the group-SPECIAL, group-AUDITOR, or group-OPERATIONS attributes in these groups, their authority extends to the new profile. Further, if the profile is a group profile, the scope can extend to profiles owned by the group itself.

The concept of ownership of any kind of RACF profile (user, group, or resource) is different from other kinds of ownership:

• When a user attempts to access a protected resource, the user might be considered an "owner" of the resource, and be given the equivalent of ALTER access authority. This is true, for example, when a user opens a data set whose high-level qualifier matches the user's user ID.
• In data set profiles, you can specify a "resource owner" in the RESOWNER field. This field is used when users allocate new SMS-managed data sets protected by the profile. For more information, see Determining the owner of an SMS-managed data set.