Explanation of terms
Data management is the management of data in the sense of making the best possible use of data for business processes in organizational, technical or methodological terms.
History of the word and its background
In the beginning was date, the Latin word for a specific day in the calendar or for a time. Latin date is accompanied by the plural data, which is also used in English and therefore appears in many IT terms, e.g., data mining or database.
As electronically stored units of information, data are fundamental resources in the digital world. How data can be collected and processed by machines for specific purposes has occupied people at least since the end of the 19th century. At that time, punched cards were used for the first time in the USA to sort and evaluate the data collected in a census. Machine data processing continued to develop over the next few decades. The electronic devices of today, which are worn on the arm as smartwatches or fitness trackers, fit comfortably in a jacket pocket as smartphones or can be taken everywhere as tablets, have nothing in common externally with the old machines, which literally took up a lot of space. The basic principle has remained the same: Facts and information are collected, sifted, processed.
What data management is good for
Electronic data processing (EDP for short) has developed rapidly since the 1980s. Today, data management or data management are core terms when it comes to the use of data which, thanks to technical development, can be stored in ever shorter times and ever greater numbers on ever smaller media and processed in ever more sophisticated processes.
