API access to the Department of Commerce Census Bureau Data Sets

In a great leap from FTP to API JSON access, the US Census Bureau has moved to "improve access to data and encourage innovation."  You can learn more about the offering by looking at the Access Data with the Census API.  In the past, you would have to find the dataset in need and then download it from their FTP server.

In order to access the API, you will need to sign up for a key.

The website does a great job at explaining what is available via the API, along with samples and example queries to help you get started.   If you are looking to augment some additional marketing information into your current Supply Chain Data Warehouses or other analytics and visualization tools, this is a great resource to tap into.  

Pull in social, economic or demographic data from the American Community Survey (ACS)  such as Households with children under 18 by congressional district

http://api.census.gov/data/2011/acs1_cd113?key=<insert your key here>&get=DP02_0003E&for=congressional+district:*

["DP02_0003E","state","congressional district"],
["74867","01","01"],
["72310","01","02"],
["74383","01","03"],......

I am looking forward to seeing some of this data in action!

The Six Social Media Skills Successful Defense Industry Execs Need Now

Reblogged from FIRE SUPPORT:

Douglas Burdett posed a great summary of an article in the McKinsey Quaterly, authored by Roland Dreiser and Sylvain Newton.

Here is a partial excerpt from the blog:

Defense industry executives who harness the power of social media can build more agile and responsive organizations, a capability that will soon be a critical source of competitive advantage.

photo credit: 96dpi via photopin cc

Social media has changed the world like the printing press did over 500 years ago. Just much faster.

Social media has touched nearly every aspect of the business world, including the defense industry. Manycompanies have responded by tapping into the potential of social media to transform and better run their businesses.

And while the mention of social media brings to mind externally facing networks like Twitter and LinkedIn, there is also a tremendous growth of social media within companies. Examples include internal wikis, blogs and other collaboration networks. For instance, in my marketing agency, the primary internal communication is done with Yammer. Yammer is a social network service for private communication within organizations or between organizational members and pre-designated groups.

Read the rest of this blog and others on FIRE SUPPORT.

Sustainment and the OEM

Now that Original Equipment Manufacturers sales of new product are waning, they are diving head first into trying to rebuild their ability to sustain legacy equipment. They obviously need to do this to drive revenue and survive the existing market conditions.

With this new push, and the realization that the OEM may not have been the actual original manufacturer of a specific part, the question arises:

"What are the pros and cons in directly engaging with third party players for sourcing spare parts instead of an Original Equipment manufacturer?"