We know how hard you’ve worked to put together a great credit union business continuity plan – the long nights of researching best practices and configuring sophisticated technologies are finally reaching an end. There’s just one problem – YOU know what a great plan it is but the rest of your credit union doesn’t seem to “get it”. We asked around to see why this happens and came up with five that most credit unions can address/fix NOW before disaster strikes!
1) Most employees say they didn’t even know the credit union had a DR/BCP (or the case of quadrant four of Johari’s window) – Many times we assume that the great plans we write will somehow magically communicate themselves down the chain and onto the production floor. This just isn’t the case. Even if an employee has heard the term BCP at work, I’m betting it is more likely to be associated with the mechanism meant to prevent offspring. We throw acronyms around as if everyone is supposed to understand them. Start with a good educational piece on your intranet and build from there. Outline the “why” you have a plan (people safety, community support and let’s not forget compliance), and who is responsible (everyone!). Every employee should be trained so they understand their roles and be trained accordingly.
2) They’ve gone rogue – With the proliferation of cloud services available to almost everyone, don’t be surprised to hear you have a few rogue employees creating their own “DR” by uploading documents to the cloud (dropbox, amazon, google drive). How can you prevent this? First you have to find out if it’s happening and this takes time and patience. My first approach would be to have departmental meetings to explain the risks of storing credit union data in public clouds. And if that didn’t work, I’d throw in the part where “it is ground for termination” if the IT Security Policy (which should prohibit this behavior) is violated.
3) They think it is an IT department thing – This continues to be the biggest hurdle for credit union BCP planners. Most staff and some executives still believe that IT will take care of everything. Never has it been more important to once and for all separate the technology recovery from the process recovery. It is completely possible to restore a process through manual or off line processing to continue to serve your members. In this case, the off line processing is an operational responsibility to develop and train – not IT.
There are many reasons why staff have trouble “buying in” to even the best credit union business continuity plan but addressing these will give you a great start to corporate awareness. Through experience I can share that the more you educate and solicit ideas from the functional areas, the more committed they become to the overall goals of the plan because it is something they’ve helped develop. For more ideas on building your DR/BCP, reach out and talk to one of our certified planners today!
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