Cognitive psychology is a study of the brain, an organ that behaves as a complex computing system. The brain signals generate electrical signals, which can be interpreted meaningfully in line with the actions performed by the brain using various computational devices and measures using electroencephalography methodology. In this thesis, the signals obtained from the brain are processed to quantitatively study and compare the brain activities of coders while programming in two different programming languages. In this research, we have chosen the structured programming language C and the scripting language Python for comparison. Previous empirical research comparing various programming languages in a controlled manner identified attributes such as correctness, robustness, syntax, efficiency, etc. as parameters that characterize those programming languages (see e.g., Nanz and Furia, 2015; Garcia Jarvi, Lumsdaine, Siek and Willcock, 2003). This thesis aims to build upon the previous findings and compare the psychological effects during programming tasks. Emotiv Epoc is a Brain Computer Interface device used for reading and analyzing brain signals in this study. Understanding the usage of the Emotiv device and the corresponding software tools is an essential part of this thesis work. Thus, in this thesis a pilot study is planned and a controlled experiment is conducted in order to collect and evaluate the data collected from the Emotiv Epoc device and self-reports to derive meaningful statistical results and interpret the emotional and cognitive activity of the participants. The pilot study aims to understand how emotions and/or cognitive load vary while coding in C and Python. Initial study involves understanding the EEG method, principles and complexities involved with the collection of data. The core part of the thesis consists of planning and conducting a lab experiment, which involves six participants performing predefined tasks in C and Python, and answering a series of questionnaires. The collected data is analyzed in SPSS tool based on factors like time, performance (correctness), and questionnaire-based self-reports. EEG signals are analyzed in this thesis up to the point of artifact removal (Filtering and ICA using MATLAB and EEGLAB). The results of the thesis reveal findings from emotional and EEG data analysis which have been captured from an experimental setup using the Emotiv device, software developers as participants and software programming tasks. The thesis helps to understand the steps to perform such an experimental study and to assimilate the emotional and cognitive load that affects the brain when performing programming. The particular comparison of C and Python as programming languages shows the high correlation between the programming language characteristics (such as syntax and time to code) and emotional and cognitive behavior of the programmers.

Aligning strategic information systems (SISs) with business objectives poses a big challenge, alignment is a complex and a dynamic process, especially with shifting business strategies. Advancement in the digital age has altered the dynamism of SISs, deployment of these ubiquitous technologies has increased competitive capabilities in organizations, as well as turned SISs management into chaotic affair. SISs are turbulent, non-linear, open, dancing systems: these features have introduced uncertainty and unpredictability, resulting into problematic alignment of SISs. Complexity science is thought to offer a solution in this alignment chaos; it is concerned with dynamism of the system. The research in this thesis focused on SISs design, designing SISs in conformity to complexity science concepts. It analyses complexity science use in SISs design. Complexity science constitutes complex adaptive and evolving systems (CAS & CES), both referred to as complex systems hereafter. To achieve SISs alignment with business objectives, organizations would not only need to design alignment applications, but also aligned network structures that enable strategic knowledge sharing, for competitive advantages. The diversity and the non-linear topology of SISs, does not allow organizations to isolate themselves from the outside world anymore; in the digital era competitive advantages arise from shared information. This thesis proposed the use of Knowledge Assets Value Dynamics Map (KAVDM) to determine the priority and order for sharing knowledge assets and for value conversion in organizations, so as to implement the proposed design. Aligned network topology introduces the network paradigm, which deals with inter-organizational network strategies. The paradigm focuses on organizational systems connectivity for competitive advantages. Complexity science was explored for SISs networked interactions, for inter-organizations alliance benefits; demonstrating the use of dynamic network alignment that adapts and evolves as the organizations knowledge needs rises. The resultant SISs network was redundant, self-regulating, and self-learning. This thesis used simple Generative Network Automata (GNA) to demonstrate that the distributed network topology can adapt and evolve simultaneously as single computational framework, conforming to the complexity concepts. This thesis employed design science research methodology combined with analytical research. It explored existing knowledge on complexity science, investigated and analyzed it possibilities for improving SISs design. This thesis also suggested how SISs should be designed in conformity to complexity science concepts. The thesis’ contribution was a conceptual model, a suggestion to the information systems research community. A literature review was applied while studying existing knowledge in SISs, open data, network paradigm and complexity science. Most publications came from MIS Quarterly (MISQ), Information Systems Research (ISR), IEEE Xplore, and Journal of Strategic Information Systems (JSIS).

As the rapid economic development of tourism industry in recent years, and gradually increasing user needs to tourism products and services, a variety of Tourism Information Systems (TISs) have been available. However, less attention is focused on these TISs from integration viewpoint, since currently most TISs are independent or isolated from the user’s perspective, tourists have to enter separately into different TISs in order to make a complete travel plan and get related tourism services. Advanced, Smart Tourism Information Systems (STISs) provide all tourism-related products and services in the unified system environment. This constructive case study proposes a framework for STIS including theoretical analyses of the core elements and components of the systems, and provides several potential development approaches to and recognized challenges as developing STISs. Interview-based scenarios with potential users are used to demonstrate the needs of independent travellers and in showing for which purposes the different systems should be integrated. The results show that the developed framework of STIS is promising and can be useful when integrating the systems as offering one-stop services for independent tourists. More research with a wider empirical sample is still required to generalize the results and test the framework in practice.

E-reseptin käyttöönotolla on pyritty parantamaan potilas- ja lääketurvallisuutta sekä helpottamaan ja tehostamaan lääkkeen määräämistä ja toimittamista. Keskeistä näiden pyrkimysten saavuttamisessa ja uuden järjestelmän käyttöönotossa on käyttäjien hyväksyntä ja tyytyväisyys uutta teknologiaa kohtaan. Tämä kvalitatiivinen tapaustutkimus selvitti, miten eri e-reseptin käyttäjäryhmät suhtautuvat e-reseptiin ja miten tyytyväisiä he ovat e-reseptin käsittelyssä käytettäviin tietojärjestelmiin Kainuun sairaanhoitopiirin alueella noin puolitoista vuotta e-reseptin käyttöönoton jälkeen. Tutkimuksessa haastateltiin 12 terveydenhuollon ammattilaista kahdesta kainuulaisesta apteekista ja perusterveydenhuollon yksiköstä sekä 15 apteekin asiakasta. Haastatellut terveydenhuollon ammattilaiset, lääkärit, sairaanhoitajat, vastaanottoavustajat, farmaseutit ja proviisorit edustavat kaikkia niitä ammattiryhmiä, jotka työssään käyttävät e-reseptiä ja siihen liittyviä tietojärjestelmiä. Tutkimusta varten laadittiin viitekehys, joka saatiin yhdistämällä tietojärjestelmätieteissä tunnettujen teknologian hyväksynnän (TAM) -mallin (Davis ym., 1989), tietojärjestelmän onnistumismallin (DeLone & McLean, 2003) ja käyttäjätyytyväisyysmallin (Doll & Torkzadeh, 1988) osia. Haastattelukysymykset luotiin tutkimusviitekehyksessä esitettyjen elementtien pohjalta ja ne toteutettiin strukturoituina lomakehaastatteluina ja puolistrukturoituina haastatteluina Kainuussa syksyllä 2014. E-reseptin käyttökokemuksiin, sen hyväksyntään ja käyttäjätyytyväisyyteen liittyvää tietoa on saatu maailmalla tehtyjen tutkimusten avulla. Suomessa e-reseptitutkimusta on tehty vielä hyvin vähän. Kaikki aiheeseen liittyvä tutkimustieto on tarpeen e-reseptin ja siihen liittyvien tietojärjestelmien jatkokehityksen kannalta. Aikaisemmissa tutkimuksissa käyttökokemuksia e-reseptistä on kartoitettu yleensä yhden käyttäjäryhmän näkökulmasta. Potilas- ja apteekkitietojärjestelmien, niiden tarjoaman informaation ja palvelun laatua sekä niiden vaikutusta käyttäjätyytyväisyyteen ja asenteisiin e-reseptiä kohtaan ei myöskään ole juuri selvitetty. Tutkimuksessa havaittiin, että kaikki käyttäjäryhmät suhtautuivat e-reseptiin hyvin myönteisesti. Myös terveydenhuollon ammattilaisten käyttäjätyytyväisyys tietojärjestelmiä kohtaan oli hyvä, vaikka he löysivät tietojärjestelmistä kehityskohteita. E-reseptin kanssa toimivat tahot voivat hyödyntää tutkimustuloksia ja löydettyjä kehityskohteita. Esiin tulleet kehityskohteet koskivat e-reseptin käyttöön liittyviä tietojärjestelmien teknisiä ja organisatorisia asioita. Tutkimus vahvisti käsitystä siitä, että e-reseptin käyttöönotto tulee nähdä teknistä käyttöönottoa laajempana kokonaisuutena, jossa huomioidaan myös lainsäädäntö. Organisaatiossa tehtävillä muutoksilla, muutokseen valmistavalla koulutuksella, johdon tarjoamalla tuella sekä käyttöönoton pitempiaikaisella seurannalla on käyttöönoton onnistumisen kannalta suuri merkitys. / Use of e-prescription aspires to better patient and medication safety, to minimize medication errors and to make prescribing and dispensing respective easier and more efficient. Essential in achieving these endeavours and to implement an information systems is user acceptance and satisfaction of new technologies. This research was carried out as a qualitative case study in Kainuu Hospital District to examine how different users of e-prescription react to e-prescribing and how satisfied they are about information systems used in the context after 18 months of implementation. Empirical material was collected by interviewing 15 pharmacy customers and 12 professionals in healthcare from two pharmacies and two primary care units. Professionals of healthcare, including doctors, nurses, receptionists and pharmacists, represent professions which use e-prescriptions and associated information systems in their work. A research framework was developed by combining parts of Technology Acceptance Model (Davis et al., 1989), Information System Success Model (DeLone & McLean, 2003) and User Satisfaction Model (Doll & Torkzadeh, 1988). Questions for interview were formed based on the elements of the research framework and structured and semi-structured interviews were carried out during autumn 2014 in Kainuu area. User experiences, acceptance and user satisfaction of e-prescribing have been researched in studies around the world. In Finland the research of e-prescribing has been scarce. Therefore, all exploratory information is useful to further develop e-prescribing and associated information systems. Recent studies have examined user experiences of e-prescribing usually from the viewpoint of only one user role. Furthermore, only few studies have been made which concern quality of patient and pharmacy information systems, their influence to the user satisfaction and attitudes towards e-prescriptions. The results of this study indicate that all user roles under examination reacted positively to e-prescribing. Healthcare professionals user were satisfied with information systems associated with e-prescriptions, although needs for improvement were also found. The results and improvement needs found in this study can be utilized by different users of e-prescription. The needs of improvement concern both technical features of information systems and procedures of e-prescribing in organisations. Implementation of e-prescribing should be seen from the socio-technical viewpoint including legislation among others. Changes in organisations, user training, management support and long-term surveillance of implementation have big impacts on how successful the implementation of e-prescribing information systems will be.

Since Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was introduced to Software Engineering (SE) field in 2003, it has gained plenty of attention and became a quite popular method to collect scientific evidence. However, SLR is a very time-consuming process, especially the study selection procedure. This study was concentrating on how to support study selection process. Design science research methodology was used. An SLR was conducted to reveal the existing evidence of supporting SLR process. The review results indicated that study selection supporting evidences can be classified into three categories: tools, information visualization techniques, and text mining techniques. However, in SE field all those existing methods or tools are still in early stage, either the effectiveness is not good or the proposed tools and techniques are too difficult to use. Thus, there is a big requirement of supporting SLR, especially study selection procedure in SE. Based on the SLR results, an iterative framework was proposed from a new perspective: refining the selection criteria to improve the selection results. There is research has indicated that inadequate SLR protocol can influence the SLR quality. Different from the previous research work, which mostly adopts automating or semi-automating selection process with various techniques, this new framework will be focused on refining the inclusion/exclusion criteria by extracting valuable terms from candidate papers. Text mining technique was chosen as the potential technique applied in the extracting process. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed framework, two SLR study selection experiments were conducted and the results were evaluated with precision, recall and F₁ score. The first experiment used the existing SLR that was conducted in this thesis, while the second one used another existing large SLR. The results from both experiments indicates that the proposed framework performs better comparing to the traditional method, with higher F₁ score which combines recall and precision. In conclusion, this thesis found a new effective method to support the SLR study selection process, which is aiming at refining the selection criteria before conducting reviewing work. Further researches can focus on improving the information extracting or combining the proposed iterative framework with other study selection support method.

Software piracy has been an ongoing issue for decades and it has a tremendous economic impact on software business. Software piracy seems to be especially common among young people, who often are technologically oriented and happen to be students. The purpose of this study was to map out what kind of a role software piracy plays among the students of the University of Oulu. The goal was also to find out how common software piracy is and how the software piracy rates differ among different subpopulations as well as finding out the reasons for software piracy. The study was of quantitative nature and a survey was conducted in order to gather data. In addition, a conceptual model was proposed and its purpose was to map out which factors influence the attitudes and intentions regarding pirating software, and the questions of the survey were partly based on the conceptual model. The aforementioned survey was distributed to the students of the University of Oulu as an online link via email. This study examined and compared the demographic factors as well as the reasons and purposes behind software piracy. The results of this study indicate that age and gender have statistical significance with software piracy. When it came to reasons, expensiveness was the most significant reason, which was in line with previous literature. The study also investigated the views of university students regarding software piracy. The connections in the conceptual model were explored as well: the factors presented in the conceptual model were found to be correlated although the strength of the correlation varied greatly. In addition, all of the connections in the model had statistical significance.

The number of people with dementia is growing as people live longer. The old-age dependency ratio is predicted to increase in Europe. Institualization of the seniors is an undesirable solution in respect of quality of life and economics. Cooking is an important part of independent living, and it could be supported with assistive technologies, such as prompting systems to increase the independence of seniors. Because of the varying and individualistic effects of dementia, different seniors require tailored assistance from the prompting system. This design science research is part of ASTS project that designs new technologies for assisting seniors with dementia to remain independent. The aim of this thesis is to develop a method that can be used to measure the level of difficulty in cooking tasks for individual seniors when the aim is to find an optimal task-person combination. This aim is accomplished by researching existing research to develop a test procedure. The test can be used to model the actions of the focus group, the difficulty of the task and the level of assistance required. The results are then used to create an individual action model that can be used to compare differences between individuals and to optimize a prompting system to assists seniors in cooking activities for the client. According the requirements of the client, a simple oven porridge recipe was chosen for the tests. Using existing theories the recipe was redesigned into workflow process model with very specific steps on how to cook porridge. The process model was validated with two pilot tests where a prompting system was imitated by verbal prompts. The actual tests were conducted with two researchers and three participants in a kitchen that was available for the participants. The tests were analyzed by adapting existing studies and methods for evaluating cognitive impairment in daily tasks. The resulting action models illustrate the workflow of senior with dementia and how to measure difficulty in kitchen tasks. The method design process was evaluated with the client, and the results of the study were compared to existing research. The designed method for measuring difficulty in kitchen tasks has five steps. The first step is to redesign a recipe into workflow process model that is built out of take, give, move and alter actions. The second step is to design a test layout for the chosen task. Alternatively, the process model and layout proposed in this study can be used. The third step is to conduct the test by giving the participant different level prompts. In the fourth step, errors that occurred are identified. The fifth step is to create the action models by calculating probabilities of each error occurring.

The purpose of this thesis is to study the process of developing a behaviour change support system (BCSS) which help users to manage and utilize their time. Proper time management is an important asset for a successful life. However, most of us have difficulties in using our time efficiently due to various reasons. Some of the reasons include procrastination and becoming overoptimistic about completing tasks in short periods of time. On this study, an iOS based application is developed based on BCSS theory. The application can be used by anyone who wants to improve their efficiency in time management. The intention of the system is to help users identify and improve their weaknesses on time management through using the application for a longer period. BCSS is one area of persuasive technology research, and it is defined as information systems designed to form, alter or reinforce attitudes, behaviours or an act of complying without using deception, coercion or inducements. BCSS are applied in various sectors such as health, wellness and environment. It is also important to note that Persuasive System Design model (PSD) is used as the main construct to develop our system. PSD provides a recent and technology oriented persuasion framework that helps to design, develop and evaluate BCSS. This project is based on a Design Science research method through developing an artefact. In the end, the system is evaluated qualitatively.

There are various forms of piracy in software business, and many prevention techniques have been developed against them. Forms of software piracy are, for example, cracks and serials, softlifting and hard disk loading, internet piracy and software counterfeiting, mischanneling, reverse engineering, and tampering. There are various prevention methods that target these types of piracy, although all of these methods have been broken. The piracy prevention measures can be divided into ethical, legal, and technical measures. Technical measures include measures like obfuscation and tamper-proofing, for example. However, relying on a single method does not provide complete protection from attacks against intellectual property, so companies wishing to protect their product should consider combining multiple methods of piracy prevention.

This thesis explains what social media marketing is as a phenomenon and what kind of roles it can fill in a company’s overall marketing strategies. The thesis also provides very practical information on how small/medium-sized companies can use social media channels in their daily marketing activities. This has been achieved through a literature review on the topic supported by an empirical multi-case study. The motivation for doing qualitative research of social media marketing in small/medium-sized companies came from a lack of such research in the literature review. The theoretical part of the thesis covers some of the basic theory about social media, different kinds of social media channels and mobile social media. Social media’s growing importance in marketing is also addressed in the literature review through earlier research, especially regarding how companies can benefit from using social media in their marketing and how it may challenge them. The multi-case study research was conducted on five small/medium-sized companies representing different industries in the Oulu area. Each company was interviewed on the topic of social media marketing, with emphasis on the motivation for using social media, social media role in marketing strategy, and the benefits and challenges of social media. The ongoing shift from traditional media towards digital media channels like social media is present in both the theoretical and empirical parts of the study. The findings from earlier research in the literature review concentrated on big brands and companies. The findings of the case study showed that social media can play a major role in the marketing strategy of small and medium sized companies. The empirical findings indicate that social media has positively impacted the sales of the case companies and that the challenges vary depending on the size and industry of a company. However lack of marketing resources, especially time, is a common factor. The findings show that social media provides a faster, cheaper and more flexible marketing platform when compared to traditional media such as newspapers and radio. However, this requires the building of an active social media presence and continuous work to adapt and improve. Together the literature review and the case study should provide the reader with a broad view into the phenomenon of social media marketing. The literature review section is mostly concentrated on corporate view and big brands, while the case study provides a good look into social media marketing of small and medium sized companies. Especially small start-up companies should find some valuable information and get initial ideas from this thesis for improving their marketing efforts with the help of social media channels.