DIMS is designed as a system to turn different types of data into information which can be used for management and/or control (as decision support or closed loop real-time control). Examples of different configurations are:

• Early Warning system for monitoring and control of water intakes
• Monitoring and control of waste water treatment plants
• Monitoring and control of sewer systems
• Environmental monitoring and management of industrial sites
• Catchment wide environmental monitoring of remote monitoring stations via telemetry

DIMS has a focus on acquisition of basic data from water, waste water, waste, air, energy, raw materials, products and economy systems, and includes tools for control, documentation and automation of the acquisition.

Methods such as continuous logging of data from sensors, batchwise transfer of data from other systems (e.g. production or economy) or manual input of data are supported through configurable device drivers or user interfaces. Furthermore, the concepts of data validation, data reduction and software sensors (from simple calculations to complex models) are supported - also in real-time – as a part of the data acquisition