The usefulness of human resources information system in the government: a case study of the Ministry of Community Development Gender and Children in Tanzania.

Human resources information (HRIS) includes but not limited to all information pertaining to how employees' are transferred from one location to the other; their education/training requirements; their personal records; their annual leave records, their promotions; confirmation; payroll; and other records. Organizations must keep these records and have a proper system for handling them, regardless of their being computer-based or not. In many organizations, it has been observed that improper handling of these pieces of information cause trouble to both employees and management. The Tanzanian government is suffering from problems caused by handling such pieces of information. Powers of computers are important in reducing some of these problems, but the way they put into use leaves a lot to be desired, although it is expensive in both time and money. The government has managed to computerize and centralize some of its activities related to human resources information at national level, especially payroll related issues at the Ministry of Finance. There is a problem of implementing HRIS in the Government, which might be caused by not having the system with the required quality. Generally, the quality of the HRIS involves the quality of the system, information and service. Therefore, if HRIS is not properly managed it may end up adding problems instead of solving them, like delay of conveying the required quality information. Hypothetically, every procedure in the government has been stipulated. Nothing is expected to go differently from those procedures. However, people involved in HRIS may neglect some of these procedures such that end results could cause some troubles among themselves to the management and organizations in general. For that matter, the Ministry of Community Development, Gender and Children was selected to represent other government institutions in analyzing the usefulness of their HRIS. Therefore, this study undertook a broad view to analyze how the government ministry manages its human resource information system, the level of use of the system, level of user satisfaction and individual characteristics that may impact on the HRIS.