LOS ANGELES — While terms such as “enterprise risk management” and “strategic risk management” are bandied about by corporate leadership a lot these days, it is just another way to describe what risk professionals have been doing all along, former presidents of the Risk & Insurance Management Society Inc. maintain.

While ERM may be not much more than a catchphrase to risk professionals already practicing the discipline holistically, using the term when talking with top executives could help risk managers better demonstrate the value they bring to their organizations, the former RIMS leaders suggested Wednesday.

The recent focus on risk management has helped those practicing the discipline to develop and deploy better tools and technology, they noted.

While the five former RIMS presidents addressed questions ranging from cyber risks to computer modeling in underwriting property catastrophe risks during the Former Presidents Roundtable held Wednesday during the annual RIMS conference in Los Angeles, questions about ERM evoked the most passionate responses.

Roger Andrews, director of risk management at E.D. Bullard Co. in Provo, Utah, said when asked recently by a member of the board of directors when the company would start practicing ERM, he told him that he's been using ERM ever since he started with the company.

“I've always felt like I do enterprise risk management for the company,” Mr. Andrews said.

Ellen Vinck, director of risk management and benefits at San Diego-based BAE Systems Ship Repair Inc., said she also was taken aback the first time she heard the term ERM at a risk management conference she was attending.

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“When that tagline first came out … I struggled with it, because I felt that's what I was doing already,” Ms. Vinck said.

“I can tell you more about the challenges of the U.S. Navy and their fleet than I would have ever thought. I can tell you a whole lot about cruise ships and the challenges that they have, probably because I really was into ERM before the term came about,” Ms. Vinck said. “I needed to know what we did for a living to know that I was insuring appropriately.”

“You know what the tagline was before ERM? You were a holistic risk management program,” Ms. Vinck said, suggesting ERM was just the current term to describe the traditional risk management function.

“As long as you know everything that you are doing and you understanding every risk that your organization faces, and you have a relationship with every department within your organization, I feel you are practicing ERM. You're taking that knowledge that you have and then using that to manage the program that you have, whether it's insurance, self-insurance, captives, whatever,” Ms. Vinck said.

Nancy Chambers, director of risk management and insurance at Bentall Kennedy (Canada) L.P. in Toronto, said risk managers should use ERM to better explain the value they bring to their organizations.

“I think it comes down to … how you market your message,” Ms. Chamber said. “Whether you call it holistic risk management, integrated risk management, enterprise risk management. Strategic risk management is a really good phrase now.”

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“Knowing your organization better than anyone else in the organization is part and parcel of a really good risk manager,” said Scott Clark, risk and benefits officer at Miami-Dade County Public Schools.

But also using ERM and SRM can help risk managers spread the risk management gospel throughout their organizations “so that there's skin in the game at the operational level, and that they understand they have a risk management objective as well, that it's not just the job of the risk manager” to manage the organization's risks, he said.

“If you work somewhere where your reputation is your greatest asset, I think the risk manager day in and day out shows their value,” said Steve Wilder, vice president of risk management at the Walt Disney Co. in Burbank, Calif. “However, I also think that we need to be challenged to be more efficient and to show that we can work more efficiently and that the things we are doing are really important to the organization.”

Mark Walls, senior vice president and workers compensation market research leader at Marsh Inc. moderated the panel discussion.