Assessing Finnish health care information system projects: How and why do they usually fail?

The role of information technology is constantly growing but carrying out information system projects has proven to be very difficult in Finland. Especially projects within the public healthcare have been unsuccessful. Finland is one of the leading IT countries in the world but facing many challenges in retaining its position. The aim of the research was to find out the reasons behind the massive health care information system project failures that have occurred in Finland during the past years. The empirical material was a sample if news articles on the topic. The information was then deepened with related literature, which discussed, for instance, information systems procurement, and features related to especially health care information system projects. A coherent strategy both for the state’s overall IT operations and for the development of HCIS, and good knowledge in information systems procurement play important roles in the success of the projects. By having good knowledge in project procurement, public buyers will be able to divide projects into smaller parts and to reduce their dependency on the vendors. Managing the project after the procurement is actually a relatively small part, if the two foundation parts are in order. End-user participation and proper monitoring and evaluation are essential during the entire project. In the future, the emphasis should be on successful examples instead of constantly focusing on negative outcomes. The media should not indulge in exaggeration. Cooperation between the buyers and vendors, between different buying organizations, and within the buying organizations should be enhanced.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

On the Effects of Forced Trust on Implementations of Small Smart Cities

As an increasing number of cities pursue the idea of becoming smart cities, the variety in different approaches to reach this goal also grows. They cover the use of a spectrum of implementations for, inter alia, information systems, smart networks, and public services. In order to operate, these smart cities have to process multiple types of data including personal information. Ultimately, the systems and services that process these data are decided by the city with limited opportunities for their citizens to influence the details of their implementations. In these situations the citizens have no choice but to trust their city with the operation of these systems and the processing of their personal information. This type of a relationship, forced trust, affects the smart city implementation both directly and indirectly. These effects include additional considerations by the city to guarantee the protection of the citizens’ privacy and the security of their personal data, as well as the impacts of forced trust on the willingness of the citizens to adopt the offered services. In this thesis, privacy protection, data protection and security, system reliability and safety, and user avoidance were identified as the four major domains of concern for citizens with regard to forced trust. These domains cover most of the main impacts smart city projects have on their citizens, such as ubiquitous data collection, scarcity of control over the utilisation of one’s personal data, and uncertainty of the dependability of critical information systems. Additionally, technological and methodological approaches were proposed to address each of the discussed concerns. These include implementation of privacy by design in the development of the smart city, use of trusted platforms in data processing, detection and alleviation of potential fault chains, and providing the citizens the means to monitor their personal data. Finally, these recommendations were considered in the context of a small smart city. The Salo smart city project was used as an example and the recommendations were applied to the planned aspects of the upcoming smart city, such as knowledge-based management, a smart city application for information sharing, and increased transparency and justifiability in governance

COMPUTER UTILIZATION AS A BALANCED OPPONENT IN DAM-DAM-AN

Dam-dam-an is a traditional game played by two players using a board with the size of 8x8 as a media. Each player gets 16 pieces that can be moved one step forward or leaped over opponent‟s piece. The goal of this game is to eliminate all of our pieces as soon as possible. It is exciting to have a challenging opponent, yet it is difficult to find a skillful one. A way to solve this problem is using intelligent computer. This paper presents the result of our research about the computer utilization as balanced opponent in dam-dam-an game using Alpha-Beta Pruning. Alpha-Beta Pruning is a best-step searching algorithm which works by considering and assessing every possibility while excluding the less useful steps. The implementation is developed using C# programming language based on Windows Runtime. Some features were added to make this game more exciting, particularly intelligence level selection (easy, medium, and hard), human or computer opponent selection, undo function, pausing menu, save-load the game, and setting the turning time. This game was validated by twenty respondents which were categorized based on their skill. Each respondent played against the computer thrice and the results were recorded. The results showed that the number of winning between the computer and each player are almost the same. It shows that the computer opponent may prove itself to be a challenging opponent for human player