Design Choices for Data Governance in Platform Ecosystems: A Contingency Model

As platform ecosystems are growing by platform users’ data, the importance of data governance has been highlighted. In particular, how to share control and decision rights with platform users are regarded as significant design issues since the role of them is increasing. Platform context should be considered when designing data governance in platform ecosystems (i.e. centralized/decentralized governance). However, there is limited research on this issue. Existing models focus on characteristics for enterprises. This results in limited support for platform ecosystems where there are different types of business context such as open strategies or platform maturity. This paper develops a contingency model for platform ecosystems including distinctive contingency factors. The study then discusses which data governance factors should be carefully considered and strengthened for each contingency in order to succeed in governance and to win market. A case study is performed to validate our model and to show its practical implications.