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CHAPTER 1

1.1            INTRODUCTION:

This chapter introduces and presents the baseline of the thesis. It provides an overview of the study and the important issues that will be discussed and investigated

1.2            RATIONAL/THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

Personnel Information System is a computer based system for the maintenance of the service registers of individuals in an organization.

According to Hicks and Gullet (19974; 316), "An information system may be defined as an organized way of sending, receiving and recording messages". Traditionally, personnel record for federal public servants of any organization in a country like ours are held in three places namely: Open and secret register of the organization at the headquarters for all the staff of the organization in the nation. The state offices for all the staff in each particular state and local government area offices for staff posted to the local government area where applicable.

There are also operational departmental records for staff at the headquarters and states head offices. This, however, led to duplication, fragmentation and inconsistencies in records of staff. Whereas, a firm's information system should be unified, there should be no contradictions, no overlaps, and no gaps.

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Information needed by many departments should be collected by one source, stored and made available to any section of the organization that needs it (Unamka and Ewurum 1995; 329). Therefore, the Data are inaccurate and thus unreliable as a basis for decision making.

Unamka and Ewurum (1995; 329) say, "Unless a manager has the correct information at the right time, he is unlikely to make the right decision".

Since the data are inaccurate and unreliable, the information generated therein is of low quality and decisions taken likely to be wrong in confirmation to;

"The higher the quality of the information, the better the result of the decision Eating" (Unamka and Ewurum 1995; 329).

For instant, the name of a deceased local government area staff may continue to be appearing in the register or nominal roll of the organization at the quarters years after the staff demise, whereas his/her name has been removed from the state register or nominal roll list. Secondly, there are cases where officers obtained additional qualification beside the ones they were employed with, but these qualifications are not accredited to them at the headquarters whereas they have them at their states office files. Another case is where a couple of staff were employed at the same time, place on the same grade level and step and posted to different states, but few years later, the officers started earning different amount of

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money as salaries because of one manipulation or the other. Thus data gathering and updating are subject to delay or worse when files are lost. Though the existing manual system of recording information is useful, however, with the development of PERSONNEL INFORMATION SYSTEM (PIS) software, personnel records will be simultaneously integrated and rationalized. It should then be seen as a route to eradicating all the problems of manual method of handling records through the creation of a single system that would provide accurate information to all in a time and cost efficient manner.

According to Unamka and Ewurum (1995; 329), "Information that is useful in business should be accurate and timely".

With Personnel Information System (PIS), the details pertaining to personnel postings, qualifications, departmental test passed, training attended, family details, etc are stored in this system. With the help of nice friendly graphical interface, retrieval of information is possible based on any individual or on collective information grouped by certain categories. These categories could be designation, retirement time, length of service, place of work or location, etc. Thus the issue of ghost workers, hiding of files, falsification of records, and other vices that are often associated with manual system will be things of the past.

Therefore, Personnel Information System is very much in need for every organization.

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1.2.4  BRIEF HISTORY OF NATIONAL POPULATION COMMISSION

(NPopC):

The present National Population Commission was established in April 1988 by the legal instrument creating it (Decree No.23 of 1989).

The Commission is made up of the board members headed by the chairman and 37 federal commissioners, one each from all the states of the federation and federal capital territory. Also on the board is the Director General (DG) who happens to be the accounting officer of the commission. The board also has appointed secretary called the secretary to the commission, who oversees the secretariat of the commission. The board has the responsibility to formulate policies as directed by the federal government, while the core civil servants are saddled with the responsibilities to carry out the policies.

The commission in other to carry out its functions effectively has eight departments and each department is headed by a director. The departments are

• ADMIN AND SUPPLY

• CARTOGRAPHY

• CENSUS

• FINANCE AND ACCOUNTS

• INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

• PLANNING AND RESEARCH

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• PUBLIC AFFAIRS

• VITAL REGISTRATION

The commission has its headquarters in Abuja and offices in all states capitals of the federation including the federal capital territory. It also has offices in the 774 local government areas of the country. Presently, the total staff strength of the commission is about five thousand. The personnel information gathering, processing and management of all the staff of the commission is carried out by the Admin and Supply department.

According to Unarnka and Ewurum (1995; 135), "Personnel Management also called human resource management is the management of people at work. That also refers to the functions and operations of a single department of the corporation which has the responsibility and authority to select and train personnel".

This department in order to carry out the complex challenges of managing human resources is subdivided into divisions to enhance efficiency. The divisions are as follows:

• ESTABLISHMENT:- Under which we have Open and Secret Registry, nominal roll, salary variations, leaves and disengagement sections.

• WELFARE:- Here we have Pensions, Gratuity, Stores, and Loans Sections

• TRAINGS:- Here we have Manpower Development and Structure sections.

• APD: - Here we have Appointments, Promotions, and Discipline sections.

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• TRANSPORT: - Here we have vehicle Maintenance, Communications and Supply sections.

• LEGAL.

1.3            STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM.

For the past four decades, manual personnel data management system has been used. This method has its problems and it has been proved to be very ineffective and inefficient, and some of the problems identified are:

• Manual method of preparing, gathering and processing data as a personnel management function entails considerable manual efforts. Thus manual method is cumbersome, tiresome, boring, frustrating and time consuming.

• Manual method has a lot of discrepancies.

• Manual method encourages frauds and corruption. Figures are easily falsified and changed with perhaps some exchange of money.

• Manual method inflicts severe hardship on the staff due to avoidable human errors, like misplacement of files. When there are errors, then the reliability, accuracy, neatness, tidiness, and validity of the data would be in doubt.

• Since it is the function of the Admin Department to raise variation advice for the use of the finance and account department (pay roll), manual method requires staff that have some numerical background to do the job reliably. This

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group of people are grossly inadequate, hence, we have a set of staff that were employed at the same time, place on the same grade level and step, and posted out to different states, but they earn different salaries years after due to variation preparation.

• Manual method results in incomplete service records of staff which undermines the personnel management function that depends upon the information gathered from the earliest stages of employee's career. For instance, additional qualifications obtained after the initial one presented on employment may not be used to place an employee adequately due to lack of updating data or information. Further, management needs adequate information to resolve disciplinary cases fairly, otherwise there may be costly delay in obtaining decision for there is a dictum which says, " justices delayed is justices denied or unfair decisions may be made in order not to deny justices. Besides, a great deal of staff time may be wasted tracking down missing documents.

• Manual method of handling personnel information involves waste of paper materials.

• The size of the paper records with attendant management problem has significant logistic implications to the commission.

• Manual method encourages waste of man-hour and resources because staff employed to carry files from one point to another do some time use the time to

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do something else instead of doing the job they were employed for. To see that this job is done more staff are employed than ordinary should be.

•     Manual method does not allow for the processing of large volume of data on a regular and timely basis.

Given these above scenarios, this study seeks to evaluate the various contributions of Personnel Information System (PIS) toward the improvement of inadequacies accompanying the manual method of handling personnel information issues in National Population Commission (NPopC).

1.4 PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

This project seeks to design and develop an efficient and effective Personnel Information System (PIS) using National Population Commission as a case study. It also aims at identifying the importance of Personnel Information System in handling personnel records against the manual method. Specifically, the following are the objective of the study.

• To identify the various problems of manual approach towards handling Personnel Information System in the Commission.

• To identify and eliminate the major problems encountered through the use of manual method of processing personnel information like falsification of records, ghost workers among others.

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• To develop an integrated and rationalized Personnel Information System in NPopC.

• To suggest other measures that will help in eradicating the problem associated with manual method of handling personnel information matters.

1.5  RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS.

Three Null (Ho) hypothesis though not tested are proposed to strengthen the concept of the project work.

•     H_I Personnel Information System will enhance significantly the processing of staff records in the National Population Commission.

•  H_O  Personnel Information System will not enhance significantly the processing

of staff records in the National Population Commission.

•  H_I  Personnel Information System will significantly affect adversely the staff

strength of the Commission.

malpractices in the Commission.

•     H_O Personnel Information System will not eradicate fraud, corruption and other malpractices in the Commission.

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1.6 SIGNIFICANT OF THE STUDY:

This study is significant in the sense that it determines the benefit accruable to the staff of the Nation Population Commission through the use of Personnel Information System against the manual method. These include:

• It supports large volume of data processing and storage; promote information retrieval, addition, deletion, as well as other database updating activities.

• It provides relevant, complete, accurate and timely information to the management and staff.

• It exposes and equips the staff of the Commission to the field of information technology by sending them to training to acquire necessary skills in Information Technology (IT).

• It evaluates quickly the establishment and payment changes.

• It demonstrates the importance of modernization of information and communication.

• It improves the quality of information communication by making it available to all the staff of the Commission at the time of their need.

• The system will enable the managers of the Commission discharge their managerial function easily on any staff at any level due to availability of information.

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• It demonstrates how business needs could be met efficiently and effectively through the application of information tools made available by the advances in the field of science and technology.

• The software will be able to compliment personnel database with payroll database. Hence, enhancing the Personnel Management Information System and tighten the control of the payroll database.

1.7  LIMITATION OF THE STUDY:

In the course of carrying out this project some factors tried to hinder the free flow of the work. These factors include:

FINANCE: Finance constituted major problem as there was no sufficient fund to round for the required materials, visit library, and cybercafẻ.

LACK OF MATERIALS: It was not easy to get written text on the subject matter

from libraries and internet.

ACCESS TO PERSONAL FILES OF STAFF: It was not easy to have access to personal files of staff. A lot of persuasion and conviction was applied before the management could grant permission for us to have access to the staff files, where we extracted the form, format we used as a model in this project.

TIME: Time was not at my liberty being a student| who is fully engaged with my studies, it was not easy for me to squeeze out time for me to out the project.

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