Effective Use of Information Technology for Performance Management in Zambian Government Institutions

The literature reviewed suggests that, much as the concept of performance management systems has been in existence for a long period of time, as early as 1980s, it is only in the early 2000s that organizations begun to reap the benefits of implementing such systems. With Norton and Kaplan invention of the balanced scorecard (Kaplan R, 2010) organizations start-ed to base performance by considering many aspects that constitutes performance of an organ-ization such as Financials, Internal business processes, customer service and people manage-ment. Use of these performance parameters would assess both individual and business per-formance as a whole. Literature suggests that integrating Information technology into business processes for example, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Supply chain Man-agement systems (SCM) and Inventory management, overlooking modernizing people man-agement systems like performance management, could be a misdirected investment. This form of IT implementations in many public institutions and indeed privately owned entities has not yielded expected results. This is because regardless of how good a technology might be and how huge the investment could be, if the people working on such IT systems are not efficient, the business cannot be productive, and therefore, the efficiency of any IT system can only yield results when there is a high level of efficiency from people using such systems. In-stitutions that have implemented and automated their performance systems have benefited from such systems in terms cost savings, speed of service delivery, productivity and the quali-ty of services being offered. To ascertain the impact of IT supported performance management systems in organizations; the research investigated use of performance management systems in Zambian public institutions and how such systems have impacted efficiency and productivity. Both secondary and primary data was used to evaluate performance management systems and also investigate available performance measurement systems used in public institutions and from the results obtained create a suitable software design model and also develop a prototype software solution capable of effectively improve productivity and efficiency in public institutions.