Acquisition: capture data taking care to strive for quality (accurate, timely, reliable, complete)

Storage: save data so that it can be retrieved (the key term here is retrieval… the trash bin will store data but it is difficult to retrieve)

Communication: Data needs to be moved from point of collection to storage, for analysis, and finally to point of use (this may a very short distance and time where data is used near collection point or may be widely separated points.)

Manipulation: data usually needs to be manipulated in some way, combined with other data, aggregated, or compared

Display: How can the data be best displayed so that it can be easily understood and acted upon?