Before introducing computers or other tools to support nursing care, it is important to have a clear picture of the information processing functions required in this area. This article presents a compendium of information processing functions used in nursing. This compendium can be used to support management of information systems in planning and monitoring nursing information systems. The article describes the development of the first version of this compendium and its evaluation in a pilot study. The results of this evaluation show that the compendium can be used to assess the quality of information processing in nursing.