Dr. Cheol-Hyun Ahn

A full-service PR consulting group, Communications Korea (Kim Kyong-Hae, CEO & president, www.commkorea.com) recruited on Nov. 16, 2009 a crisis management specialist, Dr. Cheol-hyun Ahn as deputy director of its sister company, the Korean Institute of Crisis Management and Strategy to further reinforce specialized crisis communication services.

As the importance of crisis management for Korean companies and citizens has increased with the occurrence of various types of crises such as N1H1 Flu and DDoS Cyber attack, Communications Korea appointed Dr. Ahn former director of Crisis Management Center of the National Security Council (NSC) at the Blue House (Chungwadae) who has been considered as one of the representative specialists in the public crisis management field over 20 years as deputy director of the Korean Institute of Crisis Management and Strategy.

Dr. Ahn received master’s degree from the Graduate School of Public Administration, Yonsei University and doctoral degree from Kyunghee University (Ph.D in Communication). Having worked for the National Information Service, Korea Crisis Management Center, Institute for National Security Strategy, and NSC Crisis Management Center, he has contributed to the building and operating of numbers of crisis management systems for public organizations including Korean government crisis management manual. He is currently an adjunct professor of Department of Crisis Management in the Graduate School of Public Administration, the University of Incheon.

Dr. Ahn said: “ It is very encouraging that more and more private companies as well as public organizations have been interested in crisis management and sought professional service for systematic crisis management. He added that “However, most crisis management systems that have been developed or being used for organizational crisis management seem to have too complex functions. Moreover, the utilization and satisfaction levels have been rather low due to the failure in reflecting organizational characteristics and characteristics of crisis factors.