DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPUTERIZED PERSONNEL RECORD MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

CHAPTER ONE

Every organization employs staffs and creates personnel records. Staffs is one of the organizations most important, and usually most expensive assets. Like any other asset, staff is a resource that must be deployed to maximum advantage. The proper management of personnel records can make a significant contribution to this objective by ensuring that information is available to take decisions and to protect the right both of the state and individuals. Moreover, because personnel systems are closely linked to payroll systems, improved personnel records will have a positive impact on upon payroll management and thus upon the payroll budget of the organizations. A personnel management system should run effectively weather it is in a purely paper-based environment or in the emerging electronic environment.

Organizations normally maintain personnel records of some sort at many different levels within their organizational structure and in different physical location in their offices. This variety of location has implication for the duplication records as well as for the communication and sharing of information about employees. It also has implications for ensuring the reliability of records in other to provide evidence of HR events, especially when records are located in widely dispersed locations.

There are strong links between personnel record-keeping systems and other government systems, notably systems dealing with budget, payroll and pension management. Personnel records provide the evidence and authority to pay salaries and benefits to employees. Personnel costs are likely to be the largest single item of expenditure in the public sector budget, and personnel ultimately enable governments to be accountable for this expenditure.

Different organizations uses Personnel records to provide a basis for planning, decision making and conducting business in every area of the human resource management, whether in relation to the individual employees, to group or categories of employees or to the entire workforce.

Reliable personnel records management system supports the efficient management and use of the organization’s single most important resource, its people. However, the quality of personnel records also directly affects the employees themselves, as well as their families, in relation to job security, pay and entitlements. Personnel record documents the contractual relationship between employer and employee and provide a history of employee’s career. The information held in this records are use to make a wide range of decisions, for example for promotion, transfer, termination or disciplinary action. The record also provides the authority with an instrument to determine pay and other benefits, including pensions. Personnel record management system must be accurate and complete, and must also be trustworthy to both the organization and the employee, because personnel record management system normally contains personal system about individuals, and are highly sensitive and confidential. Access to the records, whether paper or electronic, must be strictly controlled and monitored. Strong and effective security measures are needed to protect the records against loss, damage, unauthorized access or alteration, while in storage and during their active use in the office the location and use of paper records needs to be tracked. Mechanisms need to be developed to identify who has accessed an electronic record, when they accessed that information and weather any action was taken on, or changes made to the record. Those who have custody and day-to-day management of personnel records must be aware that they have been entrusted with the responsibility not to reveal information gleaned from the records.

In most organizations particularly business organizations, most of what goes on consists largely of transactions. A transaction is a recorded event having to do with routine business activities. This includes everything concerning the product or service in which the organization is engaged: production, distribution, sales, order and stock-taking. It also include the materials purchased, employees hired, taxes paid and so on. Today in most organizations, the bulk of such transactions are recorded in a computer-based information system.

Computer-based information systems are systems that tend to have clearly defined inputs and outputs that enable and provide necessary facilities for accurate and efficient management of organizational processes. It could be sales, order or record keeping of staff. Information system is collected of people, procedures, data, software and hardware. Connectivity allows computer to connect and share information, thereby greatly expanding the capability and usefulness of an information system. Computer-based information system are meant to reduce the stress in managing businesses or organizational procedures.

Management Information System (MIS) is one of the major type of computer-based information systems. It uses the database of an organization in producing well structured forms of report.

The development of personnel management dates back to the period of World War I around the year 1915 ad more recently to the human relations movement of 1935-1950. In one of the studies of Elton Mayor (2004), he discovered that psychological factors as well as social factor influence individuals at work rather than physical factors.

Specific reasons for the development of personnel management system include:

Traditionally, it was practiced in homes where the father is the head of the family. It was he who planned what the family should do, the type of farming, size and where to sell the harvested products. His wives and children helped in the process, no external recruitment was involved, so the more wives and children a man had, the more likely it was that the family to well-of. The recent practices of personnel management in Nigeria is tied up with history and development of the public services, private companies and civil services.

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