Crisis Communication: Defining Roles And Responsibilities

As a discipline, crisis communication affects many roles throughout the organization, but there is little agreement on how important it is, how formally it should be addressed, and who should be responsible for it. In an online survey of 345 Disaster Recovery Journal subscribers, Forrester found that 54% of organizations take crisis communication "very" or "extremely" seriously, and 51% address it as a component of business continuity planning. However, these results varied substantially depending on the size of the organization, and even those that have dedicated crisis communication teams show little resemblance to each other in the ways they are organized. Security and risk professionals can evaluate how closely these survey results reflect their own organization and use the findings to make improvements where necessary.