Business Continuity Management Maturity Model for Banks in UAE
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Date
2008-06
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British University in Dubai
Abstract
Organizations have gone international. They are faced with increasing levels of global competition, demanding customers and employees, shrinking product lifecycles and decreasing acceptable response times (Lockamy & McCormack, 2004)
They have employees and deal with clients, suppliers & vendors from all over the world. They use modern data processing systems to provide their customers with superior services. Realizing that these electronic systems have been, the major factor distinguishing competitors in today’s demanding business environment, organizations are taking steps to protect themselves from system failures. But, protecting against such system failures is not enough. Organizations have to be more concerned about the risks that threaten the operational continuity of their businesses as well. Methods as security and disaster recovery are no longer enough to fulfill the continuity needs of the organization.
Also, there is increasing pressure that is forcing organizations to take measures to assure the continuity of their business. This includes pressure from customers who enforce requirements to their main suppliers and also by supervising & regulatory bodies. Any event, catastrophe or disaster in any part of the world has direct or indirect influence on organizations. In UAE, many organizations suffered loss of key staff who had gone back home for vocation when the Israel-Lebanon war broke out. This led to temporary disruptions in certain areas of organizations that did not have a defined succession plans in place. Now, UAE Central Bank has mandated all Banks to comply with BASLE II requirements (The Basel II Accord – How it may benefit banks that comply, 2004), which also has a domain on Business Continuity Management.
Master’s Thesis – BCM Maturity Model iv ID: 20040020
Business Continuity Management (BCM) addresses operational continuity by concentrating on mission critical business processes. Although the awareness that something should be done to assure business continuity is present in many organizations, they often do not know how to implement BCM processes properly and integrate it through their entire set-up (end-to-end). According to a BCM survey conducted by KPMG (2006), same is the case with organizations in UAE, where only 20% of the organizations have an integrated organization-wide BCM. Details are available on KPMG, UAE website: http://www.ae-kpmg.com/index.thtml/. Therefore, organizations require an analysis tool which can be used to analyze an organization’s BCM process in terms of where they stand and what they should do to improve it. Such an analysis tool has to be based on a maturity model (as evident from the Literature review in Chapter 2)
Currently, no standard maturity model exists for BCM implementation (something like CMM, CMMI etc.). Organizations have no way to assess where they are in terms of maturity of their BCM processes, how far they have to go and what they need to get there. This research aims to develop a maturity model for Banks in UAE that can serve as the basis for such an analysis tool, using both existing literature and the data collection from local market. This will help to have an in-depth knowledge of an organization’s BCM process; comparing themselves with other similar organizations and provide insight on how to enhance their Business Continuity Management processes. This model will cover all stages an organization goes through, before Business Continuity process becomes an integral part of its culture.
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Keywords
banks, United Arab Emirates (UAE), organizations, Business Continuity Management (BCM), maturity model