Enterprises often alternate between centralization and decentralization in pursuit of agility and control. Achieve sustainable equilibrium by clearly delineating ownership: domain teams manage their data products and SLAs, while a central platform provides governance, shared semantics, and operational tooling.

Formalize this relationship through data contracts that define schemas, freshness expectations, and change management policies. Introduce transparent cost allocation for storage, compute, and egress to encourage responsible optimization.

Standardize access via a semantic layer and policy engine to maintain metric consistency and enforce security. Use scorecards to monitor adoption, quality, and cost efficiency by domain, guiding investment where it drives the greatest value. The result is a data ecosystem that enables speed without compromising standards or fiscal discipline.