As Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) examined them, war rooms could be physical, virtual, or hybrid-which turned out to be the predominant case. They could be highly automated or not, or made up of consistent well-defined teams or not. What made them war rooms in all cases was the need for collaborative decision making across silos, and the need for urgency and efficiency in taking effective action.

This report will examine the war room problem from multiple dimensions. These include roles and responsibilities (from operations to DevOps), emerging organizational patterns technology priorities, toolset adoption and toolset issues, metrics and success rates, and patterns that include success or, conversely, might otherwise lead to failure.