INCREMENTAL LEARNING KNOWELEDGE BASED SYSTEM FOR EMPLOYEES PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL AND OFFBOARDING: THE CASE OF EDUCATION SECTOR

Abstract

Human resource is one of the most crucial resources of any organization. An organization is nothing but a collection of people whose activities have been planned and coordinated to meet certain common objectives. An organization can be in a better position to survive and attain the intended objectives if it is staffed and managed by well-developed and motivated staff. In our country there are no sufficient numbers of human resource management professionals in the education sector. This condition leads to disproportional numbers of human resource management professionals and employees of education sector. Because of this problem, employees of education sector are not getting enough service related with performance appraisal and off-boarding. To this end, knowledge engineering approach was used to develop a prototype knowledge based system. Knowledge is acquired using both structured and semi-structured interviews from human resource management professionals of Haramaya and Dire Dawa universities and also relevant documents analysis method is also followed to capture explicit knowledge. Once the knowledge is acquired, it is modeled using decision tree, and then production rules are used to represent the domain knowledge. Finally a knowledge-based system is developed using SWI Prolog. The proposed system has the ability to update the rule incrementally through learning the newly arrived knowledge from domain experts. Finally, the performance of the developed prototype system is evaluated and user acceptance testing is conducted. For the purpose of testing the accuracy of the system and ensuring whether the developed system satisfies user needs or not, twenty (20) test cases were selected from Haramaya and Dire Dawa universities. The developed prototype registered performance of 85.5% accuracy and 88.1% user satisfaction. The result shows that, the developed prototype knowledge based system achieved its objectives appropriately. However, further investigation will be required to integrate case based reasoning to handle complex issues of performance appraisal and off-boarding so as to make the system more applicable in education sector.