Evaluating The Service Performance Of Fund Management Information System Of Zanzibar Social Security Fund

ABSTRACT

The aim of the study was to evaluate the service performance of Fund Management

Information System (FuMIS) of Zanzibar Social Security Fund (ZSSF). The data

were collected by using questionnaires, interviews, technical documentary reviews

and system analysis when the system users interacted with the system. The study

examined the level of users‟ satisfaction on data accessibility from the system,

response time, usability of computer applications and the system interfaces, as well

as the availability of the system services. The findings showed that, majority of

respondents were satisfied with the system services. The study findings identified a

number of factors influencing the FuMIS system service performance. These

included security, network delay and response time, network connectivity, system

misbehaviour, errors in data processing and keeping the customer‟s records. The

study found that there were challenges in data access and system‟s services

availability, especially in remote access. The study also found that there was system

users‟ workload during updating the customers‟ records at the data entry section.

Moreover, the study revealed that the main causes of these problems were: remote static

routing configuration; insufficiency of data cleaning tools whereby the manual

procedures were mostly used for data error inspection, power outage, network or device

failure; as well as lack of distributing processes between customer-care and their records

updating processes. The study recommends that it is important for ZSSF to have

redundancy routing between sites and database replication. These will reduce

network delay by reducing the number of remote access and there will be no single out

point of failure between the sites. It is also important to have automatic data cleaning

tools for error inspection, users‟ workloads management by increasing parallel

processing at data entry unit.