Data management comprises all the disciplines related to managing data as a valuable resource. The official definition provided by DAMA is that "Data Resource Management is the development and execution of architectures, policies, practices and procedures that properly manage the full data lifecycle needs of an enterprise." This definition is fairly broad and encompasses a number of professions which may not have direct technical contact with lower-level aspects of data management, such as relational database management.
Topics in Data Management include:
- Data analysis
- Data modeling
- Database administration
- Data warehousing
- Data movement
- Data mining
- Data quality assurance
- Data security
- Meta-data management (data repositories, and their management)
- Data architecture
Software design is a process of problem-solving and planning for a software solution. After the purpose and specifications of software is determined, software developers will design or employ designers to develop a plan for a solution.
The software requirements analysis (SRA) step of a software development process yields specifications that are used in software engineering. If the software is "semiautomated" or user centered, software design may involve user experience design yielding a story board to help determine those specifications. If the software is completely automated (meaning no user or user interface), a software design may be as simple as a flow chart or text describing a planned sequence of events. In either case some documentation of the plan is usually the product of the design.
A software design may be platform-independent or platform-specific, depending on the availability of the technology called for by the design.
Systems management refers to enterprise-wide administration of distributed computer systems. Systems management is strongly influenced by network management initiatives in telecommunications. The most known systems management systems are IBM Tivoli Framework, Microsoft Systems Management Server, HP OpenView, LANDesk, Novell ZENworks, BMC Patrol and CA Unicenter.
Computer networking is the engineering discipline concerned with communication between computer systems. Such communicating computer systems constitute a computer network and these networks generally involve at least two devices capable of being networked with at least one usually being a computer. The devices can be separated by a few meters (e.g. via Bluetooth) or nearly unlimited distances (e.g. via the Internet). Computer networking is sometimes considered a sub-discipline of telecommunications, and sometimes of computer science, information technology and computer engineering. Computer networks rely heavily upon the theoretical and practical application of these scientific and engineering discliplines.
A computer network is any set of computers or devices connected to each other. Examples of networks are the Internet, a wide area network that is the largest to ever exist, or a small home local area network (LAN) with two computers connected with standard networking cables connecting to a network interface card in each computer.
