I recently recorded a podcast with Stephanie Balaouras, discussing the potential for increased collaboration between crisis communication, business continuity, and risk management functions. The strategies that businesses implement to manage disasters can mean the difference between bankruptcy and resilience… and we unfortunately see reminders of this on an almost weekly basis.

As each disaster hits the news (BP’s oil spill in the Gulf Coast, the recent volcanic eruption over Iceland, the financial crisis, the H1N1 virus, the extreme weather that crippled Washington, DC this past winter, etc.), the overwhelmingly negative impacts that occur start to hit home. Fortunately, we are starting to see our clients turning more to their crisis communication, business continuity, and risk management teams to ensure that they are prepared for the worst.

There are many potential points of collaboration between these teams. . . from modeling critical business processes and assessing the business impact of incidents to executing effective remediation plans and conducting post-incident loss analysis. Recently, I’ve also seen companies that talk about starting from scratch with a risk management function, although they have already done a substantial amount of relevant work for their business continuity function.

Of course, while there are some good trends that point to increased cooperation, there are still many areas for further improvement for every company. In fact, our data shows it to be the rare case in which both internal and external crisis communication functions are handled well in the same plan, with one usually being much stronger and more of a focal point.

If you are interested in learning more about this, I suggest you listen to this 15-minute podcast and check out some recent, related reports – Crisis Communication: Building An Effective Program, Strengthening The Relationship Between Risk Management And Business Continuity, and Crisis Communication: Defining Roles And Responsibilities. These materials offer more in-depth analysis of some of our survey findings, which should help you assess how well you’re doing compared to industry peers.

As always, we look forward to any comments or feedback you may have.