Designing data governance in platform ecosystems

Abstract

As platform ecosystems such as Facebook or Twitter are rapidly growing through platform users’ data contribution, the importance of data governance has been highlighted. Platform ecosystems, however, face increasing complexity derived from the business context such as multiple parties’ participation. How to share control and decision rights about data assets with platform users is regarded as a significant governance design issue. However, there is a lack of studies on this issue. Existing design models focus on the characteristics of enterprises. Therefore, there is limited support for platform ecosystems where there are different types of context and complicated relationships. To deal with the issue, this paper proposes a novel design approach for data governance in platform ecosystems including design principles, contingency factors and an architecture model. Case studies are performed to illustrate the practical implications of our suggestion.