DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPUTERIZED OFFICE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM. A RESEARCH PROJECT MATERIAL ON COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
An Office was described as a place where all the official or paper work are done or performed. But in this era of information technology, office is no longer referred to a place but it as set of function for doing office work or activity (Nwoke: 2013). An office helps us to perform different task such as collecting the data, recording them, analyzing them, presenting them in an organized and scientific way, etc. All the functions of management like planning, organizing, directing, or controlling are controlled by office which also involves paper work. Office is the brain of an organization.
Without a proper management, an organization will lack the ability to function properly (Peculiar: 2015). So, an organization needs someone to manage the organizational activities.
Management is a common process in all organized activities. Whenever there is certain number of people working together for a common goal, some kind of management becomes essential. The direct effort of a personnel toward the achievement of goals of organization is management.
Office management is known as a profession which includes the design, implementation, evaluation, and maintenance of the process of work within an office or organization, in order to maintain and improve efficiency and productivity. This is concerned with the following elements:
Personnel: It is a person who is responsible to manage the organization or office. There should be sufficient number of trained personnel. The offices personnel must be selected properly, placed, trained, promote and controlled for the purpose of accomplishing desired goals.
Means: are the tools with the help of which official activities are done or performed. This includes the materials, machines, and equipment required by the office personnel or for office work. If the office is not provided with the appropriate means, it is very difficult to manage the organization properly.
Environment: Environment plays an important role for managing the office and for efficient and effective office work. It means the surrounding where employees work. It includes the factor like layout, interior decoration, lighting, ventilation, cleanliness etc.
Purpose: An office has to set up definite purpose. The purpose of the office provides direction and guidelines to other activities. If the purpose of the office is cleared then efforts and activities can be directed in its achievement.
1.2. Statement of Problem
Manual office systems always put pressure on people to be correct in all aspect of their work especially the Admin. With manual systems the level of service is dependent on individuals and this puts a requirement on management to run training continuously for staff to keep them motivated and to ensure they are following the correct procedures. It can be all too easy to accidentally switch details and end up with inconsistency in data entry or in hand written orders. This has the effect of not just causing problems with customer service but also making information inavailablefor reporting or finding trends with data discovery. Reporting and checking that data is also a problem and can be time consuming and expensive.
Other problems caused by the manual Office system are: