War room, business operations center, command center, mission control, Houston … No matter what your company calls it, you have one.
It’s the central hub of activity that monitors your entire business, delivering critical updates to key people across the company. Running an effective war room traditionally requires massive amounts of data and a critical 24/7 team that can translate the abstract to the actionable.
But what if this could be done more effectively, efficiently and in real time?
According to a report presented at the 2002 International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, a war room is defined as:
“…a very focused, intense effort to organize complex programs, to develop program and strategic plans, and to visualize and assimilate data and linkages between information that impact multidimensional plans. The war room enables a collaborative team to break down complex programs and information processes into comprehensible parts, to promote structured dialogue and brainstorming, to comprehend program intricacies, and to establish program concepts quickly.”
While that may conjure images from Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” war rooms are not reserved for national security. For decades, organizations across a variety of industries have set up and staffed war rooms. For example, this employee review on Indeed describes a war room specialist at T-Mobile.
With a war room of the future, rather than teams of people compiling slides and emails to keep key stakeholders up to date, you can deploy a strategy that leverages your existing data warehouse, technical network, social media analytics, sales traffic, retail performance and new product releases at once. This strategy focuses on delivering actionable notifications to team members and leaders throughout the company, simultaneously across all platforms and devices.
The war room of the future enables virtual access, removing the need for physical attendance. The infrastructure powering this virtualized war room is based on a variety of small services that can easily be removed and upgraded as an organization evolves. Data and insights are published via a variety of endpoints that enable a variety of experiences to consume the information, ranging from dashboards and reports to mobile applications and presentations. As new situations arise, the war room empowers smaller groups to collaborate, while automatically making the information available to the entire organization.
This is done without human bias and on a shorter timeline than the traditional model. It is synchronistic, real time and accurate. By removing the reliance on teams of people ingesting, interpreting and compiling data to deliver updates, the new war room delivers unbiased information automatically, based on pre-set requirements and rule sets. This allows for an all-in-one collaborative platform where decision-makers and action takers can quickly and effectively respond to alerts received from anywhere.
RELATED WATCH: Blueprint innovation around data alerts and breakout war rooms
Imagine not having to create or update new decks every day to combine with other updates to produce reports for critical teams and leadership. The war room of the future delivers regular updates on all relevant areas of the business via automatically populated reports, dashboards and visualizations, without all the manual effort. The system then automatically notifies leaders and action teams, on any device, of any action items they specifically need to act on.
These alerts are endlessly configurable to allow for flexibility on who, what, where and why a specific person or team needs to understand where the alert is coming from, and what actions need to be taken.
For example, if a phone company’s network coverage goes down in rural Mississippi, the business operations center team sees the outage, compiles the necessary data and sends alerts to key staff in the Mississippi area for resolution. If the outage is significant enough, this team may roll the outage data up the chain of command to the network team or even the relevant C-suite stakeholders. This process requires a lot of legwork and leaves much room for human error.
In this example, the war room of the future, centered on a rule set pre-programmed to be on alert for these types of events, would begin to act far faster than a team of humans could. Infrastructure, public relations and key C-suite stakeholders would automatically be alerted of the outage as well as recommended actions to take and talk tracks to address the issue.
Blueprint Technologies has the keys to the war room of the future, unlocking the ability for decision-makers to get out of their inbox, receive the right information at the right time and make better business decisions.
We are serious about the war room of the future and we want to share that future with you.
