Data governance decisions for platform ecosystems

Abstract

Platform ecosystem has become an information system research subject after many years of industry success. The concept of platform ecosystem facilitates fast and self-growing of a platform by encouraging data contribution/consumption of multiple networks, and thus the importance and value of data in platforms is accentuated. It is essential to understand how data should be managed in platform ecosystems where there is complicated relationships between multiple participating groups. However, this topic has been rarely addressed in industry and academia. Industry governance frameworks focus on organizational data, and prior research on platform ecosystem is still in early-stage. To response to the limitation, we propose critical data governance decisions for platform ecosystems, and discuss how they have to be implemented in practice. This study supports right decision making about data, and facilitates a secure platform ecosystem. We perform a case study to illustrate the practical implications of this study.