"As for teambuilding, war gaming is the wrong method. It's way too expensive. Use those silly teambuilding exercises where you lean backward and they have to catch you . . . The essence of a war game is not bonding but role-playing - that is, acting. It is an art, with a very rigorous scientific basis in strategy analysis literature. In short, I don't buy this hype, though I can see why if one wants to sell something to CIOs with money to spare, one may try and label any drill a war game. But that is just missing the point, isn't it?"

Babette Bensoussan, managing director of CI specialist company MindShifts, agrees completely. War games are all about thinking, and most businesses that play them are indeed missing the point, she says. "A war game is about how to out-think and out-manoeuvre competitors. That's the objective of a war game."

While plenty of organizations have attempted to use war games for teambuilding, Bensoussan says, to do so is to "bastardize" the concept. "The objective of a war game is to out-manoeuvre or out-compete."

While Bruce Ferguson agrees that when it comes to project management, there is a specific area where war gaming is very critical, it is a subset of all projects, he says. Ferguson is managing partner of Helmsman International, a company which manages major IT, defence and construction projects.

War games are most effective where there is a substantial risk around shareholder value or enterprise level brand recognition, where you need to make your process extremely rigorous; where the project runs over several years or is extremely large; or where you face multiple opposing forces - including regulators - that can cause you problems, Ferguson says.

"What are the rules that should govern the CIOs involvement in war games and when they are appropriate? I think the first rule is that it has got to be a high-risk project which is sufficiently important to do the additional work because it is quite expensive to do this," Ferguson says. "You don't do it on your business-as-usual, you don't do it on your normal projects - you want to do it on projects where there is sufficient importance attached, what we would call make-or-break projects; something that is putting the company substantially at risk."

Bensoussan says CIOs will typically be strongly involved in any war gaming exercise. Their staff will be required to pull profiles together and to help with ongoing monitoring.

Since a war game as played in the CI environment is used to play out a competitive scenario, it is most effectively played out when a company has two teams, one playing themselves (usually members of the marketing and finance/strategic planning teams) and another playing the competitor, says TBP Risk Services principal consultant Steve Hather. Both teams use the same set of assumptions but can react in different ways regarding products they develop, business models used and so on.

The CIO should play a crucial role in enabling the game, he says. An effective war game needs very good information about the competitive environment, backed by good qualitative and quantitative data. The CIO as "gatekeeper" and enabler of a company's internal and external information has a critical role to play in providing and arraying the information needed.

"In addition, the CIO plays a critical role as part of the senior management team in determining which if any strategic options the company should pursue, what the implications are and how to measure progress," Hather says. "The greater the uncertainty as to whether your assumptions are correct and whether the competitor will act as anticipated, the less chance you will be willing to make a big bet. The role of the CIO is then to help devise measures and report early warning signs as to whether one scenario is playing out, or whether the competitor is moving or not moving in the direction you anticipate, for example."