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What is crisis and incident management (CIM)?
Crisis and incident management is a structured approach to ensuring that your company can handle any incidents (smaller-scale, relatively discrete disruptions) or crises (larger-scale, more threatening events) when they happen.
The “crisis” and “incident” sides of CIM overlap one another a bit, but the general idea is to contain problems—both small and large—before they can cause too much damage. This entails assigning people, creating plans, and staying prepared to act swiftly and effectively when troubles arise so you can keep harm to a minimum.
Why is crisis and incident management necessary?
Unfortunately, your business is bound to encounter disruptions. You can’t predict exactly what form they’ll take, when they’ll happen, or what they’ll affect, but troubles will certainly arise, and you can’t afford to let them continue, worsen, or expand, damaging your company’s ability to function.
And you can’t simply attempt to solve disruptions on an ad hoc basis. Without solid plans in place, your response will be inefficient and chaotic. The original issue will go unsolved while secondary troubles emerge. Even an isolated, contained “event” can easily morph into a widespread crisis.
In short, CIM is necessary for preserving your company’s functionality, reputation, and future.
What problems does crisis and incident management solve?
As mentioned above, crisis and incident management keeps disruptions under control and mitigates them as quickly as possible. This can save you from a slew of problems, including:
- Lost productivity and revenue
- Customer dissatisfaction
- Bad press and a damaged reputation
- Uncertainty and lost morale among employees
- Loss of confidence among partners and investors
- Cascading damages
- Scrutiny and sanctions by regulators
- Inability to learn lessons from the disruption
How do you implement crisis and incident management?
Staying prepared to manage disruptive incidents and widespread crises requires you to:
- Craft clear plans to deploy in disruptive scenarios.
- Assign people to handle every role within your plans.
- Clearly document the procedures to follow when various situations arise.
- Set up communication protocols for when problems occur.
- Rehearse your plans, both to ensure that everyone is prepared and to identify and fix any gaps in your approach.
- Regularly revisit your plans to confirm that they still make sense.
- Perform an assessment after any CIM event to identify what did and didn’t work, and then make improvements.
Because CIM is a crucial companywide endeavor, many organizations use specialized software to maintain their plans, ensure that protocols are followed, and enable everyone to monitor the status of a disruption while it’s happening.
How does Fusion help with crisis and incident management?
A leading business continuity and operational resilience platform, Fusion has been helping companies with their crisis and incident management for nearly two decades. Fusion improves CIM endeavors by:
- Centralizing and tying together information from across your enterprise so you always have an accurate, complete view of what’s happening.
- Letting stakeholders across your company observe disruptions and response efforts as they unfold.
- Streamlining and coordinating the efforts of different participants carrying out a CIM plan.
- Automating alerts and communications by integrating with emergency notification suppliers (ENS) and other communication tools.
- Facilitating learning and plan improvement after an incident.
- Integrating your CIM with broader business continuity and operational resilience efforts.
Get (and stay) ready for anything with our crisis and incident management software
Risk is real. With Fusion, you can make strategic preparation automatic, intuitive, and effective.