Ict Business Continuity Plan and Service Delivery in Insurance Companies in Kenya.

Abstract

Information and communication Technology (ICT) has become a very important aspect of businesses across the globe. It includes information systems, hardware, software, infrastructure, and communication technologies. These systems and technologies fail at some point in time due to foreseen and unforeseen disasters or causes. Being a very critical aspect in business operations, there is need to ensure that the ICT systems are recovered and brought into operations with minimum downtimes. The speed of recovery of services operations ensures the businesses are ahead of competitor and service satisfactory level of customers. ICT business continuity plan is a set of processes, rules, procedures with proactive planning that ensures critical services that depend on ICT are restored when a disaster occurs. It is during an ICT business continuity plan that resources which involve software, hardware, technical expertise, monitory, time and other infrastructure are planned in readiness for any system outage. It enables the organization to make important strategic, tactical and operational decisions regarding critical systems availability. The general objective of the study was to investigate the influence of ICT business continuity plan on service delivery in Insurance companies in Kenya. The research design employed in the study was descriptive. It focused on major insurance companies in Kenya with motor and medical insurance services as they represent registered insurance companies with critical services offered by insurance companies in Kenya. This study employed questionnaire method of design. The survey targeted 60 employees in the insurance companies. The data collected was presented in tables, percentages, bar graphs, frequencies, proportions, pie charts, regression analysis and other presentation tools from questionnaires. The study concludes that many insurance companies depend on ICT systems to perform their critical tasks and many have ICT business continuity plans. However, the ICT business continuity plan has not been fully implemented. Many of these insurance companies’ biggest challenge was ICT business continuity plan was ignored as it was not considered a strategic aspect of the company. The key benefit of the ICT business continuity plan for the insurance companies was that ICT business continuity plan reduced system failures and improved recovery time. The study also concludes that ICT business continuity plan does not affect service delivery in Kenyan insurance companies. Other aspects of the business that company characteristics which includes size of the company, local or international ownership, years of operation affected service delivery. There is need for insurance companies in Kenya to fully implement the ICT business continuity plans for their effect to be felt on service delivery.