DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPUTERIZED PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Background of the Study: The public and private organizations generate staff records. Staff records play an imperative role in providing the information needed by organizations to manage and pay their staff members, plan their workforce requirements and monitor staff performance. Ultimately, any organization’s development and sustainability will depend on sound and effective human resource management, and the approaches it chooses to follow will be derived in part from an analysis of the information contained in staff records. The goal of staff records management is to ensure that a complete and comprehensive employment history of each employee is readily available for as long as it is needed, and that the information contained in staff records supports the management, deployment, payment and development of staff. Other key objectives of staff records management are to support transparency and organizational accountability and to enable accurate audits by creating and protecting human resource records as reliable evidence (Griffin and Hoyle, 2009).

According to Cain et al (2007) organizations need to keep staff information for long periods. For example, retention periods of 70 years or longer for staff files are common in many countries. Thus, staff databases need to store data about individuals for decades – far longer periods that is typical for most database applications. The development of personnel management dates back to the period of World War I around the year 1915 and more recently to the human relations movement of 1935 – 1950.