An EMA white paper on the state of the War Room in an era of agility and cloud

If you work in IT, you know the phrase “War Room.” The term has largely become a source of controversy and confusion, and it often invokes feelings of dread to due its very nature — a place (or places connected via a bridge call) where fraught IT staff gather to work through emergency application, infrastructure, and network issues and outages.

Seen by many modern IT professionals as a thing of the past, War Rooms are notorious for devolving into blamestorming sessions in which team representatives attempt to extricate themselves by proving that their department is not where the proverbial buck stops.

But according to EMA research on modern War Rooms, their reputation for hostility and the tales of their demise are both greatly exaggerated.

These days, War Rooms are very much alive and well, but they’ve evolved from the tense bridge calls where finger pointing and innocence proving takes precedence over problem solving. Operations staff now congregate in physical, virtual, and hybrid settings to collaborate across the silos that separate teams, and solve issues quickly and efficiently.

This EMA report examines the evolution of the War Room from multiple dimensions, including roles and responsibilities from ITOps to DevOps, as well as emerging organizational patterns, technology priorities, toolset concerns, and the metrics of success and failure.