UMBC Enrollment Management (Undergraduate Admissions, Financial Aid, Academic and Pre-Professional Advising, Registrar, and the Office of Enrollment Management) provides critical and time sensitive services to members of our community including internal and external constituents. Rare and unforeseen circumstances may occur which could impact delivery of these services. In the event of such occurrences, we are committed to being prepared to promptly resume critical operations, minimizing the impact of these disruptions on our constituents. Members of the UMBC community can be assured in knowing that our business continuity planning has prepared us well to sustain critical services without significant disruption.
In our planning, we have 1) identified potential scenarios which could significantly impact delivery of services and 2) developed strategies to mitigate these risks:
Campus Delayed Opening/Closure
Most services in Enrollment Management are available and accessible online. Services not available online may be impacted by campus delays or closures. Failure to provide a means of delivery of these services in a timely manner may impact our constituents’ ability to meet critical deadlines. To mitigate this concern, we have identified business continuity staff and essential operations to allow us to provide critical services remotely during prolonged delays or closures. We have also developed protocols for communicating with constituents to provide timely and important updates on the status of our services.
Staff Absence and Transition
Our staff are our most valuable resource in the delivery of quality services to our students and other constituents. As such, we work to ensure that staff are well trained and prepared to provide exceptional service and support. Inevitably, our workplace will experience short-term and extended staff absences, as well as staff transition. To minimize disruption to our services, critical business processes have been carefully detailed and documented. Additionally, staff is cross-trained in critical functional areas to ensure a level of redundancy for continuity purposes. Further, we have taken strategic approaches to ensure critical business processes are supported and maintained, via our central information systems infrastructure, to allow staff access to essential information.
Disruption of Data System
Data and data systems are vital to our daily business processes and decision making. Institutional measures have been developed to minimize the impact of disruption to data systems. These plans include employing robust system security measures, performing routine data backup, and ensuring data redundancy, where needed. Additionally, Enrollment Management has developed contingency plans that enable us to deliver essential services should data systems become unavailable. These plans include documented, detailed instructions of how to manually execute key operations and procedures for communicating pertinent and timely updates with our constituents.
Disruption of Interdependent Services
Many of the critical and core business functions in Enrollment Management are dependent upon sustained operations within our community, both internal and external. Additionally, many operations in Enrollment Management affect critical operations in other areas of our community. Failure to proactively recognize and understand the significance of these interdependencies increases our vulnerability for prolonged disruption of services. In effort to minimize this vulnerability, Enrollment Management has identified our interdependencies and the nature of these dependencies. Additionally, we collaborated with our campus partners to develop contingency plans that specifically address these dependencies.
As stated in our mission, Enrollment Management is dedicated to providing our constituents the highest level of quality and innovative enrollment services. As such, our constituents can be assured in knowing that continuity in services is our priority. We are confident our investment in business continuity planning affirms this commitment.