Enterprise Risk Management was meant to deliver a single view of risk: a coherent picture of exposures, interdependencies and priorities across the whole organisation.
Boards were promised visibility. CROs were promised clarity. Audit and compliance were promised alignment.
Yet, for many organisations, the reality is far more fragmented.
Cyber presents one narrative. Compliance presents another.
Operational risk has its own universe of RCSAs. Audit works to a separate assurance cycle.
Resilience and continuity teams operate on impact tolerances. Governance teams observe culture and conduct.
The “enterprise” view becomes a carefully collated story, not an integrated system.
The pieces exist, but they do not join.
This blog explores why ERM still operates in silos, and what needs to change for genuine integration.
Why Now: Integration Talk vs Integration Reality
Recent research continues to show that enterprise risk remains functionally and technologically fragmented.
A February 2025 article in MIT Sloan Management Review, based on new AuditBoard data, reports that more than 86% of audit and risk professionals say data silos affect their team’s ability to manage risk effectively. When teams and systems are disconnected, efforts are duplicated and gaps in risk coverage quietly open up
A 2024 risk management study by Coalition Greenwich, sponsored by TS Imagine, found that 39% of risk professionals have to look at multiple systems just to get an overall picture of risk, and 45% cite aggregating all the necessary data as a top challenge. Many admitted they simply can’t “roll up” exposures into a single, coherent view of enterprise risk.
Hyperproof’s 2025 IT Risk and Compliance Benchmark Report tells a similar story from a GRC perspective: 42% of organisations say data and system silos create fragmented risk management approaches, and over 40% lack a centralised system for risk management.
So, while ERM has become a standard phrase in board papers, the infrastructure behind it is still patchy. The risk function may have an “enterprise” mandate, but the underlying data, tools and behaviours remain stubbornly siloed.
The message is consistent and uncomfortable:
ERM is structurally present but operationally shallow.
True ERM: Where Governance, Risk, Audit and Compliance Actually Fit
Many organisations still treat ERM as a second-line discipline responsible for maintaining the framework, consolidating risk registers and preparing quarterly reports.
That model is outdated and fundamentally incomplete.
True ERM is not a second-line function. It is a cross-functional operating system.
It must integrate:
Compliance
Compliance brings regulatory obligations, conduct risk and policy intent.
If compliance risk is not linked to enterprise risk, obligations remain technical rather than strategic.
Integrated ERM aligns:
- Obligations → to risk appetite
- Emerging regulatory trends → to strategic risk
- Compliance monitoring → to ERM’s top risk themes
This ensures compliance isn’t a parallel governance track, and it becomes part of the enterprise risk story.
Internal Audit
Audit provides an independent challenge.
But in a siloed environment, audit plans often align to assurance cycles rather than enterprise priorities.
Integrated ERM requires:
- Audit plans aligned to the enterprise risk profile
- Shared insight on control failures and systemic issues
- Combined assurance models (audit + compliance + risk + resilience)
This does not threaten audit’s independence.
It strengthens it, because independence without alignment creates duplication, not insight.
Risk Governance
Risk governance — committee structures, risk appetite, escalation routes — is the glue.
Without shared governance mechanisms, ERM cannot join the dots.
Integrated ERM embeds:
- Shared appetite statements across functions
- Unified severity scales
- Cross-risk forums where insights are reconciled, not merely presented
- Escalation thresholds that apply consistently across functions
Corporate Governance
Boards must receive a single, coherent narrative, not four competing ones.
Corporate governance, therefore, sits at the top of the ERM ecosystem:
- Ensuring risk, audit and compliance do not contradict
- Checking alignment between behaviour, appetite and decision-making
- Assessing cultural signals that unify or fracture the risk picture
In other words:
ERM is not a framework that reports on risk.
ERM is the mechanism that connects how the organisation sees, owns and governs risk.
Without this integration, enterprises produce excellent functional reports, but a fragmented enterprise truth.
The Anatomy of a Silo
Silos form through accumulated patterns:
Different languages
Cyber speaks in vulnerabilities and threat actors.
Compliance speaks in obligations and breaches.
Audit speaks in findings and ratings.
Risk speaks in appetite and heatmaps.
Resilience speaks in scenarios and tolerances.
None are wrong, but none are aligned.
Different systems
Each function invests in its own best-of-breed tools.
These systems rarely integrate cleanly, even when organisations try.
Different interpretations of “critical”
A red risk in cyber is not the same as a red risk in compliance.
A “high” impact in resilience is different from a “high” impact in finance.
Different escalation cultures
Some functions escalate early.
Some escalate only when a mitigation plan is ready.
Some escalate only when asked.
The result?
ERM receives slices of reality, not a connected view.
When Data Doesn’t Connect
Gartner’s 2024 Risk Trends identifies a major challenge: organisations have adopted highly specialised risk platforms, but they do not share common data models.
The outcome is predictable:
- multiple dashboards
- conflicting metrics
- duplicated controls
- inconsistent assumptions
- incompatible severity scales
Boards then receive an “integrated” report that is, in truth, a collage of mismatched perspectives.
It’s not a visibility problem.
It’s a coherence problem.
Coherence is the real prize of ERM, and the thing most organisations lack.
When Silos Become Culture
The greatest risk posed by silos is not operational inefficiency.
It is cultural fragmentation.
When functions behave separately, people behave separately.
Employees learn:
- “Risk means something different to every department.”
- “Escalation depends on who you work for.”
- “We fix things within our silo, not across the enterprise.”
- “We protect our data and our narrative.”
This quietly creates a siloed risk culture:
- People optimise for their function’s KPIs, not enterprise outcomes.
- Teams use the language of their silo and struggle to translate it.
- Leaders become defensive of their frameworks and metrics.
- Issues are managed locally, not collectively.
This is not a cultural inconvenience.
It is a cultural risk.
Risk culture fragments fastest, where governance fragments first.
Unless organisations design risk culture as an enterprise discipline, the organisation will default to functional instincts.
Why the Integration Gap Persists
Despite years of frameworks, systems and speeches, integration still fails because:
Tools arrive before taxonomies
You cannot integrate data built on incompatible assumptions.
Functional ownership becomes territorial
Each domain wants to protect its nuance and authority.
ERM is given responsibility without authority
It compiles but cannot challenge.
Leadership incentives reward local performance
Silos are reinforced, not corrected.
Culture reflects structure
People escalate vertically, not horizontally.
Integration isn’t prevented by frameworks.
It is prevented by behaviour.
From ERM as Reporter to ERM as Integrator
ERM has to stop being the department that compiles the final slide.
Its value lies in creating enterprise coherence.
That means:
- Aligning appetite across all second- and third-line functions
- Reconciling conflicting interpretations of exposure
- Ensuring compliance, audit and risk don’t deliver competing stories
- Creating shared definitions, shared thresholds, shared scenarios
- Enabling the board to see a single enterprise truth
As Coalition Greenwich observed, modern tooling can support this, but only if governance and data standards are aligned first.
ERM’s job is not to summarise risk.
It is to connect it.
Practical Steps for CROs and Risk Leaders
Map decisions, not structures
Find where risk actually lives and crosses functions.
Harmonise the minimum viable taxonomy
Integration requires comparability, not uniformity.
Run cross-functional scenario workshops
Audit, compliance, cyber, ops and resilience should work from a single scenario, not five different ones.
Treat fragmentation as a measurable risk
Track misaligned ratings, inconsistent appetites and duplicated controls.
Build governance forums around sense-making
Not updates. Not templates.
Conversations that reconcile, not report.
Final Thought: Integration Is a Behaviour, Not a Framework
The biggest gap in enterprise risk is not intellectual.
It is behavioural.
The studies from AuditBoard, Coalition Greenwich and Hyperproof all converge on the same message:
Organisations have not yet made integration a daily discipline.
But they can.
By connecting compliance, audit, governance and risk into a coherent operating system.
By treating culture as infrastructure, not atmosphere.
By making integration a shared responsibility, not an aspiration.
Only then can ERM finally do the job it was designed for: help the organisation see the whole picture, not just the part it owns.
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