More than half of organizations shifted the focus of their ERM program to emphasize health and safety and business continuity in response to the pandemic, according to the RIMS 2020 Enterprise Risk Management Benchmark Survey. COVID-19 also prompted organizations to allocate more resources for risk management and to shift governance oversight for risk management to new executive- or board-level oversight groups. Overall, ERM has become “an accepted mainstream business discipline,” but “work still needs to be done to make ERM fully integrated, agile and proactive.”
Respondents said that the top five areas where ERM had greatest value were: increasing certainty in meeting strategic and operational objectives; eliminating silos and viewing the entire portfolio of risk; avoiding and/or mitigating risk; increasing risk awareness; and improving decision-making. Risk professionals also reported that their organization’s executive management team relied on the ERM program to provide reasonable assurance that major risks are managed and that 76% of senior leadership teams and boards applied ERM insights to business decisions.