A 20th CITIS application could put social media “to work”
MIL-STD-974, MILITARY STANDARD: CONTRACTOR INTEGRATED TECHNICAL INFORMATION SERVICE (CITIS) (20 AUG 1993)
This standard defines a set of core and tailorable Contractor Integrated Technical Information Service (CITIS) functions that collectively constitute a contractor provided service for electronic access to and delivery of contractually required digital data. It also defines support and ancillary functions necessary to efficiently utilize a CITIS.
Above is the official definition of Milspec 974 that specifies a Contractor Integrated Technical Information Service or just CITIS for short. So, what was the goal of Mil-Std-974? Officially this designates a service that designated Department of Defense (DoD) personnel will be provided with electronic access to contractor program data. In plain English this means that the DoD wanted to be informed as to developing product data of the weapons system that was being built by the designated contractor.
If we translate this to everyday civilian life we can imagine a customer of a supplier of products or component products wanting to be updated on progress and/or problems related to the product development. Maybe an engineer or program manager at the customer would like to review a part or subsystem, etc. The standard process would be for that person to call the contact at the supplier and discuss it over the phone and then request a drawing or schematic. It would be normal for the supplier to then email an attachment to the customer. A back and forth exchange would take place and some time would pass before any agreed upon action could be taken regarding a problem, etc. Any proposed change would have to be agreed to and each side’s engineering change systems would have to move forward and it could be quite a while before the proposed change is implemented.
Although the above scenario seems like this would have taken place about twenty years ago, this could very well be taking place right now in 2017. After all, if there are many manufacturers out there who are still using Microsoft Excel as their product information system, then why not a manual back and forth between a supplier and customer?
CITIS did embody that approach to supplier and customer relations. Although there was a positive reception to it, the fact is that although it was an official DoD Milspec, it was a standard. And standards tend to be like pieces of art in a museum, studied and admired, but rarely inspiring action to implement the standard.
Currently there seems to be a lot of discussion on collaboration and innovation and tools to enable them. These tools could be an answer to the supplier-customer situation or perhaps they might just be too complex in their approach to what at its heart is a simple problem demanding a simple (in design) solution.

During the time of the inception of CITIS I was part of a group who was charged with developing a CITIS solution. This solution, which we called Sextant was proposed to Lockheed and the Air Force for the F-22 (Stealth fighter) program. We designed the application to one, present the product information in a “BOM-like” context. And two to enable the end user to navigate that context and enable search for a part without any specific part information but that the user could just describe what he/she is looking for.
In my view, the time is appropriate for marrying a CITIS application with 21st century social media, and integrating the application with what I refer to as “systems of record”, e.g., PLM, ERP, etc. We would be marrying social media, document/CAD viewing, and in terms of development process, the engineering change function. Then the 21st century CITIS would give social media the purpose of promoting a business conversation and placing it at the center of the supplier-customer relationship.
