Data strategy for digital platform businesses

Does our data strategy and internal API implementation support extension towards open platform business models and ecosystem participation?

This article is part of the Digital Platforms hub

Platform ecosystems are complex systems. While platform organizations participate within larger ecosystems, a platform organization internally is also a complex system coordinating across various resources and workflows. When incumbents transform to a platform business model, the platform organization needs to be set up to facilitate workflows across diverse resources and coordinate access to these organizational resources (both data and services). Again, as mentioned above, setting up standardized access and coordination also needs to be complemented with an organizational model that empowers loosely coupled innovation teams to innovate off these standardized services.

The technical interfaces enable coordination across the various organizational building blocks, enabling them to communicate with each other.

Every platform organization needs:

• An explicit architecture design to specify the various functional building blocks across the organization;

• A definition of interfaces that specifies how the organizational building blocks interact with each other; and
• Organization-wide set of standards.

A platform organization that adheres to these core technological design principles is well set up to expand towards ecosystem orchestration. Internal organizational resources, accessible through APIs, are coordinated across the same standards as external ecosystem resources. By extending internal standards and opening out interfaces to the ecosystem business, the platform firm effectively coordinates across internal and external stakeholders.

To guide organizational and technical architecture, every platform organization needs a well defined data strategy, which articulates how data will be acquired, managed, transformed, and deployed as a crucial business resource to enable and inform business strategy. Every platform organization needs a cohesive data strategy and a structured roadmap for implementation. In most traditional organizations, data acquisition is incidental to existing business processes. At a platform firm, data acquisition needs to be strategically planned and must be determined by business goals.