Data management, data processing and data governance are terms that are often used interchangeably to refer to similar practices, sometimes resulting in confusion. Data management refers to the ingesting, processing, securing and storing of data so that it can be used for decision-making purposes. Data processing, on the other hand, refers more specifically to the transformation of data in order to make it suitable for analysis, for example, by cleaning, filtering, sorting, recoding, reformatting, (dis)aggregating or harmonizing (GNO-SYS, 2022). Data governance refers to the policies and procedures facilitating data management, such as formal agreements answering questions such as:
- Who has ownership of the data?
- Who can access what data?
- For what purposes can the data be used?
- What security measures should be in place?
- Do the data comply with new regulations? (Tableau, 2024)
Finally, whereas data management does not necessarily include the design of data operations or the analysis and interpretation of data, the data life cycle comprises all phases that data go through from generation all the way to interpretation (see Figure 1) (Ghent University, 2023).
Figure 1:
