The Alignment of Data Governance and Ecosystem Orchestration to Address Grand Challenges

Paper i proceeding, 2025

Drawing on the business ecosystem and data governance literature, we conducted a case study of a waste management program in Africa to investigate how the leader of a waste management ecosystem aligned data governance with their orchestration activities to support fulfilling the ecosystem’s value proposition. Our findings show that as part of its orchestrating role, the ecosystem leader employed relational data governance mechanisms to build trust and promote data sharing among ecosystem participants. As a result, structural governance emerged in the form of new data governance roles. While the orchestrator assumed the role of data trustee, complementors became data stakeholders, which contributed to the establishment of data governance procedures for the ecosystem’s shared data assets. Together, relational and structural governance enabled collective procedural data governance, which supported the fulfilment of the ecosystem’s value proposition. This research contributes to the information systems and business ecosystem literature by revealing how data governance enables the creation and maintenance of shared data resources to further enhance an ecosystem’s ability to achieve sustainable value creation. We discuss the significance of relational data governance mechanisms and the emergence of structural data governance in the form of data roles in inter-organizational data governance within the context of ecosystems addressing global challenges, as well as theorize the relationships among relational, procedural, and structural data governance mechanisms in this context.