Enablers of Successful Business Continuity Management Process

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a management process to ensure the resilience of an organization in the face of a range of business disruptions. It considers the mitigation of risk in the business functions, put in place the process and procedure to recover the IT systems and business functions during any interruptions. BCM evolved from Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) that commenced in the 1970s to recover electronic data processing capability during the mainframe era. In addition to technology recovery, BCM covers the recovery of people and business as a whole. It includes the full suite of recovery plans from reducing risks of business disruptions, response to disruptions and mobilise people to the secondary site to continue business. Service disruption is intolerable in the business environment especially in the financial industry, the lifeline industry in most countries if not all. The respective regulators have stringent guidelines to ensure the smooth operations in order to minimize systemic disruptions in the banking environment that ultimately impact the economy of the nation. Though with many strict regulations, coupled with availability of advance technology to recover business and technology services, there were still many banking interruptions that shocked the nation and caused severe inconveniences to the banking customers. The aim of this study is to identify the enablers of a successful BCM process. The first phase of this study involves the understanding of factors impacting the BCM process and develops a conceptual model for a successful BCM process. The methodological instruments employed include data collection through emailed questionnaires to the staff working in the BCM, IT, Operations, Risk departments of financial institutions. The data collected will be used to test the conceptual model and analysis will be drawn. The findings of this study provide useful information and could help bank managers implementing and maintaining BCM process in an effective manner. The main findings of this study is that technology components (IT availability and reliability, complexity and technology competence), perceived BC benefits, top management support, external pressure to adopt BC and business environment have positive effects on BCM implementation in the financial industry in Malaysia; but organizational compatibility and infrastructure readiness did not.