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?"