May 26 2014

Business Intelligence Lessons From Star Trek

Categories: General,Rants Dave Rathbun @ 12:55 pm

Author Note: This blog post was originally a guest entry at The Decision Factor, a site that appears to have ceased publication. I have reproduced it here. It was fun to write, and I hate to see good content go missing. The original post was published in 2012 but I believe the content is still relevant today.

While the touch-panel displays on Star Trek: The Next Generation certainly foreshadowed the iPad, the focus of my discussion today is around another blog: “Five Leadership Lessons from James T. Kirk,” published by Forbes Magazine.

While Captain Kirk had his flaws—making his character all the more interesting—he certainly was the unquestioned leader of the Enterprise. I enjoyed reading the article and think the specific lessons outlined also apply to business intelligence.

I’ll share the first two with you today and save the others for a future post.

Never Stop Learning

When Kirk ran the Enterprise, the Federation was much younger. Their mission was to seek out and explore, encounter new civilizations, and learn from them. The opening monologue said it all:

Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Sounds like good advice for business intelligence professionals too, right?

In order to deliver effective results, we have to first understand the business. Whether we work for a large company or a small start-up, knowing the business (and the data) is the first step towards providing business value. It doesn’t help to design solutions in a vacuum that the business won’t understand, won’t use, and doesn’t need.

As a business intelligence professional, I look forward to those times when I get sent to the far reaches of our enterprise (see what I did there? 😉 ), so that I can directly observe business processes in action. The lessons learned might not provide an immediate benefit. It might be months or even years, before I can put something I have learned to good use. What’s important is that I do interact with the business and learn from that experience.

Have Advisors with Different Worldviews

Captain Kirk was blessed with a diverse crew, not only on the bridge of the Enterprise but throughout the ship. This was no accident. James Roddenberry, the visionary behind what ultimately became one of the biggest TV and movie franchises of all time, intended this to show how a diverse crew of different ethnicities, genders, and planetary origins could act together in towards a common goal. Spock and Dr. McCoy could hardly have been more different, yet each was able to provide valuable input to Captain Kirk’s decisions. They each supported his role as their captain and leader in their own way, often in direct opposition with each other.

In the business intelligence role, it’s just as important for us to seek out and explore diversity. Before designing a system, I need to talk to everyone who might use the system and gather their input. Getting only one side of the story could lead to incomplete requirements, which in turn leads to wasted time and money. In this day and age (much less the 23rd century), we can’t afford to do much of either.

Stay tuned for more business intelligence lessons from Star Trek

In a few weeks I’ll return with the final three leadership lessons from Star Trek that have implications for business intelligence professionals. In the meantime, I wish you success in exploring the world of business intelligence.