BUSINESS CONTINUITY MANAGEMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Higher education establishments are large and complex organizations that can face numerous challenges in their daily activities. In an ideal situation an incident is quickly approached, very good handled, prevented or avoided. But in other situations, the institutions should find the solution for minimizing the disruption and protect their activities, community of students and of course the staff. A common approach that helps organizations to plan a response to potential interruptions of the business activities is Business Continuity Management (BCM). This enables higher education institutions to keep the pace and then return to a normal course of operations as soon as possible; it enables in times of activity interruption to continue performing the activity of education which is vital to a society. The COVID-19 pandemic has lately "forced the hand" of many higher education institutions to comprehensively and immediately adopt the online learning and teaching, and also all other activities from the educational system in order to handle and prevent the potential outbreaks. Therefore, the time has come to implement the IT business continuity (BC) plan, these are created to make sure that the organization would be able to go on with critically needed activities in times of emergency situations. This paper analyzes the challenges and readiness of higher education system to adapt to current pandemic situation, and namely, to implement the continuity plan if any existed. The need for IT business continuity was certainly considered just a concept until it has become a reality. Most of the higher education establishments did not have sufficient time, resources and incentive for making use of information technology in continuing their activities. The pandemic situation has caught the education system on moving ground and is presenting it as overwhelmed with challenges. The movement of all the course offerings into online environment and supporting students, professors, and faculties to conduct the learning, teaching, researching, and working remotely has come with great efforts and challenges. The BCM concept requires a change before the change, or before the emergency forces to change, because one of the key activities of business continuity and disaster recovery planning is certainly change management; which has the goal to introduce and implement changes into the institution/organization, process or system in coordinated way and by handling the circumstances and issues during the way. The maturity of higher education's business continuity plans it is questionable when seeing how hard the latest pandemic hit the system. It is clearly that institutions have now understood the importance of the "joker" from the pocket - a well-established plan that will become the new normality, because this is the major part in covering the gap in crisis situations.