A named user account is assigned to a specific, real person - like an individual unique email address.
Hi dlaw-esristaff , just to let you know, anyone that would move items in/out of our hold "headless" account ALSO have their own named user account. We also have some headless accounts that are the "Department of.." or "Division of..", but again, those publishing all have their own named user accounts.
The first use-case above is so when users leave employment we can move their data to a safe place and delete their account until the Division hires a new person or assigned the data to someone else.
The second use-case is so we have services published as the organization rather than an individual. Users will work under their own named user account, but when read to push to public and/or OpenData, they will pass ownership to these headless accounts.
I don't see any other way to handle these two situations. I apologize for deviating from the original question, but I think there is a case where you need a headless account.
However, as I mentioned and you confirmed, each field users needs their own named user account. We just went thru this in our office this summer having to disable/delete old and inactive users to allow field work to happen. This is not a good work flow, or at least will not be as more users want to use Collector. Although we are looking at possibly eventually expanding our named-user slots, I don't think that will happen for a while. fwiw.