DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN INTEGRATED ONLINE EVENT BOOKING SYSTEM

1.1 Introduction

Event booking management is a new evolving field which was birth in order to manage different kind of event, depending on the number of people involved. Event booking management is the organization of all the tasks and activities necessary for the execution of an event regarding its strategy, planning, implementation, and control, based on the principles of event marketing and the methods of project management (Loos et al, 2008). The context of event flows includes multiple states and participation from different people such as event registration, pending registration, cancelled event, approved registration, attendees, and event managers. The manual process of managing an event is time consuming as man is prone to error.

As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.

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1.2 Background of Study

The continuous advancement in the information and communication technology as contributed a lot to the universe, making life easier for individual, organization, institution and every field now see the importance of ICT as the world goes global and tend towards ubiquitous computing. The rate of time consuming task and tedious activities has reduced as a result of this advancement because many tasks can now be automated with the help of technology improving the manual way of processing, storing, accessing, communicating and providing information from one person to another or among group of people. The role of information is inevitable in our daily lives. Information is extremely important to the successful functioning of any organisation. The constant and steady stream of communication and information helps to build credibility and reflect a sense of transparency in our daily interaction. Various people assemble together for the purpose of communicating with one another towards achieving the organisation’s goal.

The workspace in our daily activities requires proper interaction as event is considered as one of the frequent task in an organization. Events have the distinctive ability to bring people physically together, and to motivate and make them communicate in ways that cannot be easily copied by other means. Although events are important part of human life but the subject however is poorly developed and there is need for proper enlightenment. (Malhotra, 2002).

An event covers extensive functionality and many different contexts. It concept includes social gathering, sport, meeting, entertainment, festival etc and it has become a fashion to use the word event for something that involve people and time in a particular place. It is seen as a functionality “primitive” meaning something that happens attached to a time frame. Events could be anything from an item in a personal schedule, such as informal gathering, a formal gathering. Event is a word that is generally used for an occurrence at a given place, a special circumstances, which can only occur ones. One key characteristic of an event is that they are time limited, it is not a continuous process, each event has a start and finish time and it is very difficult to replicate an event no matter how one tries (Getz, 2007). Further study of this subject shows that beyond the ability to create an event (time and scope), some functionality are also required such as registration of event, email notification of event updates, multiple event administrators (with different level of authentication).

Though scheduling an event within similar or different group is a very tedious work because it is very difficult to find suitable time between multiple individuals. Different techniques, tools, technology have been developed in time past to solve problems relating to how to properly manage an event. The need for scheduling was birth with the question of how to manage time and execute plans in our daily life. Scheduling is considered one of the old problems in the field of the computer science, this problem has been recognized in number of computing field, in order to solve this problem number of integrated solutions have been developed. A large number of the research works and implementations of different algorithms have been designed, developed and simulated for solving the critical problems linked with the scheduling. There are numbers of common algorithms which have been utilized for solving the scheduling problem such as “Priority Scheduling, First-Come, First-Served (FCFS) Scheduling, Round Robin (RR), Shortest-Job-First (SJR) Scheduling and many others”.

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1.3 Statement of Problems

Event involves bringing people together within a time frame in a particular place. The major problem is how information about the event is been communicated and how to secure a proper venue for each event. The manual way of conveying messages bring about certain restrictions such as non-availability of the proposed receiver, omission of vital details from the dispatcher, etc. Another problem is people forgetting about the event date or time, because there is no proper documentation about the event. Sometimes the purpose of the event is not well sent out, so lack of preparation for such meeting occurs.

In addition, we have different unit in an institution, each with different work and functions. Sometimes different unit fix the same event venue, the same day and time, without knowing that the venue as been schedule for another meeting. This leads to congestion of event and most events as been terminated or conducted lately because of lack of venue. It is in this light that this project seeks to develop a system that will provide solution to these problems stated above.

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1.4 Aim and Objectives of the Study

The aim of the study is to design and implement an Integrated Online Event Booking System. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives will be set out as follows to design and develop an application software that will:

1. Extensively carry out an analysis on how event is been managed in the institution;
2. Improve on the existing method by automating the manual ways of scheduling an event;
3. Develop and implement Integrated Online Event Booking System for an health centre; and
4. Develop an application that will accurately schedule multiple event meet-up with reference to time.

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1.5 Significance of Study

In academic environment, proper coordination of venues for an event and those that are to participate in such event is of high importance towards preventing clashes of venues and also uninvited personnel to a particular event. In this modern age where computing is becoming ubiquitous, organizations are being encouraged to have an information system that will assist them in the management of events.

The Event Booking System developed in this research work will be beneficial to the staff of a particular institution (Federal University of Technology). The institution will benefit immensely from implementing this system as it will make the assigning of event venues and sending of notifications to attendee a seamless effort.

The employee of the organization will also be able to get notification when a new event is created in which they are to be part of, also the System will send a reminder in form of SMS and Email to the attendee in some days or hours as it is being setup by the organization.

Finally, the organization can generate frequent reports on event venues, date, time and those that are to attend a scheduled event

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1.6 Scope of Study

This scope of this research work is focused on the Design and Implementation of an Integrated Online Event Booking System.

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1.7 Limitations of the Study

During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:

1. Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
2. Establishment Policies: Establishment policies posed a serious limitation as most staffs are not ready to release information needed for this project work. There were lots of information needed from the staffs of this institution to enhance the study which took them time to release or they did not release at all for security purposes, hence the scope was reduced.
3. Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
4. Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
5. Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet).

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1.8 Definition of Terms

Information: Knowledge communicated or received concerning a particular fact or circumstance; news

Event: An occurrence, especially one that is particularly significant, interesting, exciting or unusual

Scheduling: Planning work that needed to be done, showing the order in which tasks are to be carried out and the amounts of time allocated to them.