Data, Kim etc whats their job? it seems to be some kind of merger between science and engineering? It's never been clear to me.
I always thought it meant the day to day routine running of the ship, which would encorporate a lot of engineering, distribution of power, etc. Of course, in emergency situations - as we usually saw in Star Trek - their duties tended not to be routine.
In "Remember Me", Dr. Crusher described Data as the officer who sat at Ops, while she laid hands on the chair where he always sat. So is Ops a job or a station?
If I understand correctly, the official title would be operations officer, but the station would be ops. The person could be nick-named "ops," as well, I suppose. In the earliest TNG episodes, Picard sometimes refered to the two forward facing officers as "con" and "ops."
A related question is where was the Enterprise's senior science officer? Hey, maybe he was the guy pulling bridge watch when everyone else was in the meeting room.
Data and Kim are Operations Manager who sit at the Ops Management station. their job is coordinating operations aboard ship, such as sensor use, power needs, reports and other boring crap. Data was the E-D's science officer, by dint of being an android, he did 3 jobs, ops, science officer and second officer below Riker.
No doubt the Science Officer was in his or her Science Office. I mean, there's no question that the ship had a bunch of Science Officers, and one Chief Science Officer analogous to Spock among them. Such a person is directly referenced in "Conspiracy", for example: Riker wants to summon his Science Officer to look at the bug that Quinn brought aboard. The question of whether he was referring to Data or not remains open. But this person, if not Data, apparently wasn't a bridge officer, any more than Chief Medical Officer Pulaski was. Nor was the original Chief Engineering Officer Argyle a bridge officer, judging by his absence from the bridge and from bridge officer meetings unrelated to engineering. But it seems that any officer can acquire these bridge officer qualifications if he or she so wishes, by taking a suitable series of courses and whatnot - and thus CMO Crusher appeared to be a bridge officer, as were CEO LaForge and CSO Spock. Such status might hold a few perks - but it would also distract from the main jobs of these specialists. And perhaps Picard didn't want his Science Officer distracted, so he channeled all his science questions through Data, who either had the answers in his head already, or put the Science Department to work by sending a suitable email command, then waited for their answer. Really, on a vessel as flexible as the TNG starships, it would be up to the presonal preferences of the CO to tell where each of his officers sit and work. Gathering them all in the same room might be counterproductive, but OTOH it wouldn't be too inconvenient to allow the CEO or the CMO to operate a workstation on the bridge instead of in their own offices every now and then. Timo Saloniemi
Personally, I've always kind of regarded Ops as being the liaison between the bridge and the various departments throughout the ship. I do tend to think that Data was the unofficial chief sciences officer simply because of who he was, but I also think that there were numerous other science officers heading various divisions in sciences like stellar cartography, exobiology, astrometrics, etc. At ops, though, Data was in prime position to coordinate all the sensor data collected and analyzed by the science divisions. It's possible that on the bridge of other Galaxy-class starships that seat on the captain's left might have been filled by a chief science officer (rather than a ship's counselor), who would frequently be seen working at the aft science stations when the need arose...
Oddly enough I had to look this up recently... the encyclopedia lists the Operations Manager as the 'officer responsable for coordination of the various departmental functions aboard the ship', which would make for a good 2IC role such as Data. It basicly sounds like an admin role, though communications seemed bundled in there for Voyager as well... which makes a bit of sense as the D had the security officer answering the phone.
The operations manager role is a role that is occupied by an officer who looks better in a gold uniform, regardless of the fact that the officer is clearly meant to be a science officer, who would wear teal.
According to Memory Alpha: Furthermore, a conversation between Worf and Sito Jaxa in the TNG episode "Lower Decks" seems to give an indication of the day to day duties of the ops officer of manager: Hope that all helps. Aaron McGuire
Yes, that never really made any sense. I suspect it was nothing more than giving Tasha/Worf something to say when there wasn't any fighting going on. Ops and Tactical actually seemed to duplicate quite a lot of functions, particularly sensor-related, early on.
^ And remember when Data was believed destroyed in The Most Toys Worf was reassigned as Operations Manager.
Perhaps the silliest thing about the bridge console assignments in TNG was that Data was more than capable of doing every job on that bridge by himself. The bridge could have run perfectly successfully with him alone on a quiet night shift where 'creative ideas' form the emotional crew weren't needed.
Well, in RL, the best way to describe what the OPS Boss (Operations Officer) does is that he/she makes sure the mission/task the ship is currently assigned to do happens, while the XO handles the paperwork and the "routine of the day". In other words -- if the CO wants to do law enforcement boardings, then it's the Ops Boss's job to: find the TOI's (Targets of Interest), work with the Aviation Detachment to locate and/or prosecute them, determine the course to the same, and then "run" the boarding party (the Boarding Officer has the hands-on job on the boat being investigated, but the OPS will be on the Bridge handling radio traffic, etc.). If there's contraband onboard, then the OPS figures out how to get it back to the ship, what to do with the prisoners legally, etc. If the XO isn't around, then typically the OPS Boss will be acting XO, unless the EO (Chief Engineer) is senior to him and decides he wants to be the HMFIC. Make sense? Cheers, -CM-
Opps is a station. I never remember anyone being introduced by a captain as, "And this is so and so, my Opps Officer." Harry Kim is an engineering/services kind of guy who gets stationed at opps a lot. It's a good place from which to speak lines, really.
And here I thought this thread was going to have to do with DS9. Which I think is essentially why the position was invented. Data didn't look good in a blue uniform, and they didn't want to be exactly like Spock, so they thought up a reason for him to be in yellow in a position where he could deliver similar dialog. It worked so well they carried it over to DS9 and VGR. And unless I'm mistaken, Kim was referred to once or twice (I think once in the pilot, the other I can't think of) as 'Operations Manager.' But Colonel Midnight, that's the best real world explanation for it I've ever seen and it actually makes more sense to me now than it ever has.
The nice thing about the word is that pretty much anything can be called an "operation," so you can use it however you want. In the USN the shipboard Operations Department was an outgrowth of Combat Information Centers, established during WW2 to collect, evaluate and disseminate data on the current tactical situation. As such, this is the main "sensor" department of a ship, which it combines with other functions like intelligence analysis, to present the CO with as complete a picture of what is going on as possible. The petty officer known as an "operations specialist" today was originally titled a "radarman," which gives you some idea of the origins of that department. On a small ship, IIRC, the communications officer will be under the ops officer, while big ships have a separate communications department. --Justin