Each year, Forrester Research and the Disaster Recovery Journal team up to launch a study examining the state of business and technology resiliency. Each year, we focus on a particular resiliency domain: business continuity, IT disaster recovery or crisis management and enterprise risk management. The studies provide BC and other risk managers an understanding of how they compare to the overall industry and to their peers. While each organization is unique due to its size, industry, long-term business objectives, and tolerance for risk, it's helpful to see where the industry is trending, and I’ve found that peer comparisons are always helpful when you need to convince skeptical executives that change is necessary. For better or for worse, it is a fundamental part of human nature to want to go with the herd. For those who are interested, there is a great Freaknomics podcast on the subject called “Riding the Herd Mentality: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast.”

This year’s study will focus on the integration and interplay between BC, crisis communication, and overall enterprise risk management. Crisis communication is critical to the successful invocation of any BC plan. In fact, year after year, when we ask BC influencers and decision-makers to cite their top lessons learned from their invocations – underestimating the importance and difficulty of communicating under duress is always near the top of the list. And for years, we’ve heard how many organizations are more closely aligning or integrating BC with enterprise risk management. You’ll see this in many financial services industries where BC reports into an operational risk management team and where they have consolidated processes like the business impact analysis and risk assessment. Whether this is a good thing or not, is another blog post.

And for those who complete our survey, I’m offering a complimentary Forrester report by myself and co-research director and partner in crime, Chris McClean, titled “It's Time To Include Social Technology In Your Crisis Communication Strategy.”

Click here to take our survey.