Let me highlight a few ways that the AIES improves upon the surveys it replaces.

First, we’ve done extensive respondent outreach and research that informs the AIES strategy and design. By consolidating data collection for multiple sectors into a single platform, we are substantially reducing reporting burden for the many medium- and large-scale companies that operate in more than one sector. We also heard from many respondents that they would like to use spreadsheets to report the more detailed data. Thus, once respondents provide basic company-level characteristics, we generate a customized spreadsheet with the appropriate detailed questions specific to their business. By adding this option, we’ve also aligned the reporting of the AIES with the economic census, which most respondents are already familiar with.

Second, the AIES will leverage key Census Bureau infrastructure investments intended to improve data collection processing and dissemination. AIES will be the first survey to move to our new Data Ingest and Collection for the Enterprise, (known as DICE), platform. This will provide the AIES with dramatically more flexibility adjusting survey content, sampling and introducing nonsurvey source data than feasible in the specialized collection platforms employed by the existing annual surveys. This latter feature is critical as the Census Bureau continues to explore how to use the growing amount of rich source data available from both public and private sources to provide data users with more detailed, timely and accurate economic statistics. We’ve already had some success in augmenting our survey data in the retail trade sector (as with our experimental Monthly State Retail Sales estimates) and in researching methods to more fundamentally reengineer the retail sales and price statistics produced by both the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The design of the AIES and the use of these flexible enterprise platforms will allow our statisticians and subject matter experts to efficiently adjust content both generically for all sampled firms or just those in specific industries and geographic areas. By using the Census Bureau’s new infrastructure platforms, the AIES will take advantage of the most up-to-date technology and computing environments to greatly improve the flow of data from collection to dissemination.

Finally, the AIES represents not just a technical transformation but an organizational and cultural one as well. The existing surveys that the AIES will replace, while all managed within the Census Bureau’s Economic Programs Directorate, have evolved independently. They’ve had their own staff, methods and processing systems for decades and developed their own unique ecosystem of data users and stakeholders as well as approaches for working with respondents. Overcoming this inertia was not trivial but our employees and leadersh­­ip were up to the challenge, knowing that success would position us to provide better data to our users while reducing costs and respondent burden. Moreover, the greater efficiency allows our staff to do what they came to the Census Bureau for – to deliver new and improved data products that track our evolving economy to policymakers, researchers and the public.