Service War Room - Advice File published on exp.com, June 2001 -
© Copyright 2001-2003 by Sylvia Nickel. All Rights reserved.
- Well, that is good question. If you use this technique for your business the result should be to act at minimum one step faster than your competitors. In fact it is a term with many sites.
- MILITARY: In military terms a war room is the headquarter, the strategic command centre. It is a place where important and very secret decisions are made, e.g. battle plans and attack plans to occupate enemy's territory
- POLITICAL: In political terms a war room is the headquarter of a political campaign or the decision centre for strategy and tactics in debates and campaigns. Please have a look at the so-called movie, which shows strategy and tactics in the 1992's US-presidential race. Here the important weapons were communication channels and marketing campaigns to built up an unique image. We all know who won. So it works!
- STOCK EXCHANGE: The stock war room is the information centre about company's news and stock pricing, mostly worldwide combined. It is the brain of a stock exchange and a must for all active members. All companies listed on stock exchanges have to give their ad-hoc-messages about exchange rate influencing facts to the war room
- BUSINESS: If you read the lines above you can combine: a war room is the company's decision centre or headquarter, where communication channels about internal and external, even competitive, information find together and are analysed. The weapons in business, information and marketing strategies are created here. You may also heard about business or corporate intelligence. It is the strategic way to get and promote information. So there is one question left:
First of all: Clarify your required infor-mation, your information channels and your type of information flow. For instance defining your global/regional environment, your competition and your customers.
Second, add possibilities to tap new sources. For instance install information scouts in various areas. Plan your approach to use information about processes and your products.
Third, standardize your information and your fact sheets. You may also use an enterprise resource planning system (ERP) or a professional database system for computing the information.
Fourth, last but not least. ...now you created a place where all decision mak-ers can understand all aspects of any problem, get a structured picture of the whole situation and are able for rapidly decision making. Add external, but serious and tight-lipped experts on business law, PR and finance. - Hold strategic decisions and alternatives undercover. Now you are finished: That is your war room.
WHAT'S NEW ON THAT?
You may asked yourself: What is new on that? Well, it is the way of information performance: simple, quick, effective - just smart. Remember some of your problems last month:
- Did you worry about the project costs running up while the performance gets into nowhere?
- Did you wonder about your competitor getting the job you will swear you had best offer?
- Do you know the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) from your computing work places?
- Do you know how much time Mr. X needs for the same job as Mr. Y?
- Did your hear 'confidential' information from external sources?
- Do you know your total costs of the administration work? And do you know your competitor's costs?
- Do you know your customer's needs?
- Do you know the competitor's prices?
- Do you know the competitors equity and strategy?
NICKEL CONSULTING SERVICES ON WAR ROOMS
We help you creating, installing and improving your war room system.
- Proofing your required information; depending on the industry, the com-petition and your specific competitive position we help defining the strate-gic information and the information workflow.
- Defining a war room information system; depending on your IT-Structure and information workflow the quantitative and qualitative facts are defined. Useful tools like Balanced Scorecard, ERP-Systems and Benchmarking-Elements are integrated
- Installing war rooms; how to handle the information? That is the step to solved by identifying key information and interpreting it.
- Developing war rooms strategies; as external experts we help you in-terpreting the facts and developing strategic alternatives.
- business law
- taxes
- loss prevention
- public relations
- corporate finance
- IT-architecture
