Wargaming for CIOs Introduction
The arrival of game-changing technologies like mobile apps, social media, cloud computing, and the like have brought forth a new paradigm in the decision-making process. In these unique situations and rapidly emerging technological landscape, traditional strategy development tools yield limited results. Wargaming has been a popular tool in the military and late gaining adoption in business environments.
Business Wargaming is an adaptation of the art of simulating moves and counter-moves in a commercial setting. Unlike military war games, or fantasy war games which go back hundreds of years to the days of Prussia and H.G. Wells, business war games are a relatively recent development, but they are growing rapidly. The time has come for CIO organizations to adopt this technique in order to stay ahead of their challenges.
Wargames can help enable foresight into future scenarios holistically and help build a proactive strategy and a better reactive strategy.
The advent of new types of competitors, with new cost structures from the emerging markets, has put pressure on the traditional cost structure of businesses making it challenging to compete in a global economy.
The ever-growing list of new regulations and compliance needs, with many more in the pipeline, has complicated the use of technologies further by imposing controls.
In order to embrace the new business reality, CIOs need to look at a new strategy development process that will make decision-making realistic at minimal risk. In this paper, we try to define the limitations of conventional IT strategies, a framework to pick the right situations to deploy a Wargame, types, and levels of Wargame, and finally the design and execution of Wargames. Last but not the least; we touch upon some best practices and pitfalls with respect to Wargaming.
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