CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF STUDY
Virtually all software used in enterprises today has the same goal which is
supporting business processes. Some processes are entirely automated, relying
solely on communication among applications, others probably rely on people to
initiate the process, approve documents the process uses and resolve any
exceptional situations that arise like incomplete information. In either case, it’s
often possible to specify a discrete series of steps known as workflow that describe
the activities of the people and software involved in the process. Once this
workflow has been defined, an application can be built around that definition to
support the business process.
An office management is a set of activities organized hierarchically in a tree
structure. An office management consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a
depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of
persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.
Office management may be seen as any abstraction of real work, segregated in
work share, work split or other types of ordering. For control purposes, it may be a
view on real work under a chosen aspect, thus serving as a virtual representation of
actual work. The flow being described often refers to a document that is being
transferred from one step to another.
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An office management system is a model to represent real work for further
assessment, e.g. for describing a reliably repeatable sequence of operations. More
abstractly, an office management is a pattern of activity enabled by a systematic
organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flow, into a
work process that can be documented and learned. Offices are designed to achieve
processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision,
or information processing.
Office management concepts are closely related to other concepts used to describe
organizational structure, such as silos, functions, teams, projects, policies and
hierarchies. Office management may be viewed as one primitive building block of
organizations.
The term office management is used in computer programming to capture and
develop human-to-machine interaction. An office management software aims to
provide end users with an easier way to orchestrate or describe complex processing
of data in a visual form, much like flow charts but without the need to understand
computers or programming.
An activity represents an action in an office. It can be a complete activity that
consists of several child activities. An activity can be sequential which means that
the order of its action is specified at design time or the activity can be event driven
which means that the order of its action is determined at run time in response to
external events.
Windows office management foundation is a Microsoft technology for defining,
executing and managing offices. Windows office management foundation includes
a default set of activities that provide functionality for control flow, conditions,
event handling, state management and communicating with applications and
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services. Windows office management foundation also provides an extensible
model and designer to build custom activities that encapsulate office functionality
for end users or for reuse across multiple properties.
Windows office management foundation comes with a programming model, a
rehostable and customizable office management engine and tools for quickly
building office management application on windows. It can be used to enable
workflow within line of business application, user interface page flows, document
centric workflows, human workflows, composite workflow for service oriented
applications, business rule-driven workflows and workflow for system
management. It has the ability to monitor a running office activities, examining it’s
execution in real time. Every office management system contains some number of
activities, each of which performs some aspect of that workflows function. Office
management acts as a container for these activities, providing a way to control
their lifecycles and order of execution. Windows office management foundation
aspires to support both system workflow and human office management in a
unified fashion. System office management tend to execute activities in a well
defined, predictable ways, while human office management do not. To address
both of these requirements, windows office management foundation provides two
built-in office management types: sequential office management capable of
executing activities in a predefined pattern and state machine office management
capable of responding to external events as they occur.
Using office management system to automate students’ registration process
is very necessary because of the flexibility and convenience it will offer both to the
institution and students. This research work when implemented will make it
possible for students to do their registration electronically on the institution’s
website. The workflow management system will then keep track of the student’s
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registration process from one department of the institution to the other until the
registration process is completed. It will also give the student feedback anytime the
student log on to the school’s website to know his or her registration status. The
workflow will also create automatic database for the storage of the student’s
electronic form.
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The current student’s registration process of Obasanjo collage of health sciences
which is based on manual registration process is characterized by lack of integrity,
concurrency problem and the inability of student’s to process their registration
online from any place.
The current manual registration process exposes the system to lack of security of
information thereby making the student’s information to be exposed to
unauthorized users.
Lack of a good database for student’s forms exposes their files to the dangers of
fire outbreak and flooding.
With the current system, student’s who have not paid their school fees can easily
photocopy the forms from others and do their registration.
The current system does not support online registration which makes it mandatory
for the student to do their registration within the school and this involves the
transfer of this forms from hand to hand for approval and distribution for manual
storage. Therefore the proposed system which is web-based will address the
problems of insecurity, loss of document and delays in the student registration
process.
1.3 OBJECTIVE OF STUDY
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The purpose of this research work is to develop a system that should be able to
achieve the following:
1. Automation of the student’s registrationprocess by changing all hard
copy procedures involved to electronic media.
2. Provision of a robust database for the electronic storage of registered
students’ data and at the same time reducing the number of stand
alone databases.
3. Generation of students’ registration number after the student have
been duly cleared.
4. The use of office management to create a process that can help in
routing, approval, tracking and scheduling of activities involved in the
registration process.
5. Using office management system to notify students of their
registration status anytime they log in on the site.
6. Providede password to prevent unauthorized users from accessing and
manipulating information.
1.4.SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY
Using office management to automate and keep track of the student’s registration
process will eliminate the problems associated with the current manual student’s
registration process which includes but are not limited to lack of information
integrity, concurrency problem and lack of data security.
This project when implemented provides a common office management
technology for windows which makes it possible and easier to implement a
registration process that can rely on multiple windows applications.
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It can also offer an office management framework for diverse applications that will
allow the student’s registration process to be hosted in any environment and also to
be customized for any environment.
Again, it can unify the system and human office management involved in the
student’s registration process. This will also provide support for delay in the
registration process which will provide the ability to modify a running office
management.
1.5 SCOPE OF STUDY
The scope of this research work is centered on the registration process of the
students of Obasanjo collage of health science makurdi, Benue state. This
project which is web-based, automates the student’s registration process, generates
students registration number, monitors the movement of the electronic form online,
notify students of their registration status anytime they log onto the school’s
website and also maintains the integrity of the information being processed by
using password to limit access to only approved individuals. The system also
creates automatic database for the storage of successfully registered students
1.6 LIMITATIONS OF STUDY
Due to time constraint and limited resources, the use of biometric could not be
incorporated into the work for authentic identification of real students as well as
incorporating text message alert facilities.
1.7 DEFINITION OF TERMS
Activities are the fundamental building blocks of workflows. An activity
represents an event in a workflow. An activity can be sequential which means that
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the order of its action is specified at design time or event driven which means that
the order of its execution is determined at run time in response to external events.
Workflow: According to the Workflow Management Coalition glossary (1996)
workflow is defined as the automation of a business process, in whole or part,
during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to
another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.
Office Management System: According toFischer and Layna (1999) it is a system
that defines, creates and manages the execution of office management through the
use of software, running on one or more workflow engines, which is able to
interpret the process definition, interact with office management participants and,
where required, invoke the use of IT tools and applications.
Web-Based System: K.M. Hussain and D.S. Hussain (1997) opined that the term
Web-Based system refers to those applications or services that are resident on a
server thatcan be accessible using a Web browser and is therefore accessible from
anywhere in the world via the Web.
Internet: Behrouz and Chung (2004) in their book defined internet asa global
system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite
(TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. They further opined that It is a
network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic,
business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by a
broad array of electronic and optical networking technologies. According to them,
internet carries a vast array of information resources and services, most notably, the
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inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the
infrastructure to support electronic mail.
World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as The Web, is a
system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet as noted by
Sanjay Sharma (2006). With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain
text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by using
hyperlinks.
JAVA.
Java is a fully computational object-oriented language. As such, it is a suitable
vehicle for conventional standalone programs or applications, which is the main
use of the language today.
Java is also a multithreaded language and this feature makes it a highly scale
able language for programs that execute on web server. Consequently, in recent
years there have been increasing use of java for server SID, or servlet
programming.
With many programming languages, compilation produces machine code.
Each platform will have its own machine specific code, so a program compiled on
one platform will need to be recompiled on another before it can be ran. Java byte
code is an intermediate code between source code and machine code. The byte
code can be ran by any java interpreter that conforms to the java virtual machine
(JVM) specification. A JVM can be standalone interpreter or embedded in a
browser or electronic device. Java is case sensitive, using PUBLIC instead of
public, for example will be rejected by the compiler.