# data[].attributes.body
"defeat device"
Impact: the company advertised their cars being extremely fuel efficient, however the emissions that were emitted, were not within regulations

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603189/the-biggest-technology-failures-of-2016/

C.Norris

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When: September 9, 2012 (Release date)

Impact: Apple users were given incorrect directions and got lost repeatedly. Also incorrect information was appearing on the maps which included capitals were spelled wrong and places were mislabeled.  Outdated Business information was also on the maps, chains that no longer existed were appearing all over.

Why: Apple stated they underestimated the complexity of the project. Meanwhile the company they sourced their mapping Data from called TomTom, stated apple was trying to combine too many sources of data to create Apple Maps, which resulted in the data getting "lost in translation" and being incorrect.

Overall they should have released it initially as a beta, and now apple maps is continually improving and asking users to notify them when they come across incorrect information so it can be corrected.

Link:
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/ios-6-maps-what-went-wrong-1118121

- Brooke Fountain

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When: Jan 2016

Impact: the Nest smart thermostat owned by Google was hit by software glitch that left users in the cold. The software update went wrong and left the device battery drained leaving it unable to control the
thermostate

Why: Nest said the fault had been caused by December 4.0 firmware update, plus issues such as old air filters or incompatible boilers
Results: 4.0.1 update was rolled after and it seems to fix the problem for 99.5% of the affected customers.

Link
http://www.computerworlduk.com/galleries/infrastructure/top-10-software-failures-3599618/
Abeer Rkie

# data[].attributes.body
When: October 22,2008

Impact: Performance Designed Products LLC had to recall 57,000 wireless guitars, which sold for $40-$60

Why: Defect on the circuit board caused batteries to leak if installed improperly. The leaking battery acid caused chemical burns on consumers.

Amanda Hibbs

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Well that’s embarassing. It looks like the page you’re looking for has been moved or is no longer available.

# data[].attributes.body
When: 2010

Impact: thousands of dollars wasted across many school boards

Why: Like many new technologies the intended users lacked the training and the confidence to overcome their intimidation of the equipment. This leads to a feedback loop of teachers not using the smartboards because nobody else uses them and can give guidance when needed.

Link:http://www.ictinpractice.com/why-do-smart-board-implementations-fail/

Brad Furtah

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When: Continuous since 1998
Impact: $1 Billion, plus a potential $800 Million is wasted funds.The failure took place over 4 separate projects all based on SAP AG software.
Why: The Navy wanted to modernize as far as supply chain,acquisition, financial
management, and others. They were unsure if it was feasible to begin with, and in the end according to Michael Taffe, an analyst from Boston AMR Research, " trying to implement ERP on the scale required by the U.S. Navy is an overwhelming undertaking. Under the best of circumstances, it has a high degree of risk".
Link: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2558133/enterprise-resource-planning/gao--navy-sinks--1b-into-failed-erp-pilot-projects.html

J. Wright

# data[].attributes.body
When: 2009-2011

Impact: Massive Global recalls of

4RUNNER

AVALON

CAMRY Models

COROLLA

ES Models

GS Models

HIGHLANDER Models

IS Models

LS Models

PRIUS

RAV4

RX

SIENNA

TACOMA

TUNDRA2

Why:  Electronic Throttle  Control System. Causing unintended acceleration

Link: http://www.garyeto.com/auto/toyota-recall.html

C. Clark

# data[].attributes.body
When: 2013

Impact: The U.S. spent over 1 billion on an ERP system, that was eventually deemed useless.

Why: Proper research was not obtained to determine that best way to create/implement the software.

Their down fall was also how many times the project leader was switched in the span of 7 years. Which made it difficult to be consistent with their expectations for the product.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/aerospace/military/us-air-force-blows-1-billion-on-failed-erp-project

A. Smith

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When: January 28th, 1986

Impact: During the tenth flight of the space shuttle challenger the vehicle suffered a catastrophic failure of an O-ring seal located in it's right-most solid rocket booster. As many of us can remember this lead to burning gas compromising the structural integrity of the rear joint housing and external fuel tank immediately after launch. The combined damage and structural stress caused the shuttle to break apart shortly after - all hands were lost.

Why: The O-ring in question was not designed to operate in the low temperature conditions that were present at launch. NASA management staff were aware of the potentially catastrophic flaw since the 1970's; but failed to address the issue and ignored NASA safety protocols to proceed with the launch.

Results: A re-hauling of NASA safety regulations, changes to the  decision making process for management, a grounding of the NASA shuttle fleet for three years and a redesign of the solid rocket booster system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster

~ Eric D. Jenkins

# data[].attributes.body
When: 2014

Impact: Recalled 440,000 smoke detectors in 2014 the year google acquired it for 3.2 billion dollars.

Why: Found users could accidently turn off the smoke detectors which could be very dangerous had there been a real fire.

Link: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/13/after-samsung-note-7-recall-10-biggest-tech-recalls-ever.html?slide=3

K. Balicki

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When: 1999

What: Repeated mishaps involving the company's SAP ERP, CRM and supply chain applications resulted in the company failing to deliver $100 million worth of Hershey's product orders prior to Halloween of 1999

Impact: Operations came to a screeching halt, $100M orders were not fulfilled. Lead to a 19% drop in quarterly profits and 8% decline in stock price.

Why: Hershey's tried to cram a 48-month implementation period of new Supply Chain Management (SCM) software and Customer Relations Management (CRM) software into a 30 month turnaround so the systems could be rolled out by the millennium. Due to busy seasons approaching (Halloween, Christmas), the company had to cut corners on critical testing phases. When the system began in July 1999, system errors prevented orders from being completed and shipped out. $100M worth of orders were not fulfilled even though the inventory was available and in stock.

Link:
http://erpsoftwareblog.com/cloud/2015/03/a-lesson-learned-from-hersheys-failed-erp-implementation/

S. Sparks

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Welcome to Hersheyland, the home of a million moments of goodness. Whether you want to rustle up a quick homemade treat to make everyone smile, level-up a serious bake or two, or simply explore our beloved chocolate, snacks and candy, we're choc-full of ways to make life a little sweeter.

# data[].attributes.body
When: 2016

Impact:
Billions of dollars in legal fines as well as replacing or repairing thousands of previously sold vehicles

Why:
VW claims that they created a system for reducing noise in the engine, but it caused emissions to rise. Their solution was the "defeat device" to offset readings during e-testing. It was illegal, unethical, and led to a massive scandal and executives resigning.

Link:
http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/news/a30029/vw-acoustic-function-defeat-device/

R. Patel

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When:  2015

Impact: Diesel cars were emitting 40 times the amount of pollution that was allowed.

Why: Volkswagen was using software that called "defeat device," which was supposed to hide the amount of pollution emitted from the vehicle. But now they have been caught and fined, "$14.7 billion to cover legal penalties and the cost of replacing or fixing 475,000 automobiles in the U.S."

Link:https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603189/the-biggest-technology-failures-of-2016/

J.Li

# data[].attributes.body
When: 2016

Impact: Over 80,000 public servant's pay are affected.  Where some will be overpaid, underpaid, or not paid at all. Also employees information is easily accessible causing a privacy issue.

Why: It seems the new pay system was not ready to be put into place as there for still some critical defects in the system, which can cause the problems of properly distributing pay.

Link: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-ottawa-timeline-1.3691812

Alex Shin

# data[].attributes.body
When: 2013

Impact: $1.1 Billion purchase of Tumblr leads to little disclosure about its true success, hinting to analysts that it has only earned, at most, double-digit millions in revenue per year.

Why: Poor business model and strategic application as well as market growth of Tumblr, a microblogging platform, has failed to produce monetary results that equate to or exceed its initial purchase at $1.1 Billion.

Link:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The activist hedge fund has stepped up its attack on Yahoo (YHOO) and its CEO Marissa Mayer, and it's not hard to see why. Following the initial public offering of the e-commerce company Alibaba (BABA), Yahoo netted $9.4 billion. It retains a stake worth approximately $32 billion in the Chinese company. Yahoo also owns a multi-billion dollar slice in Yahoo Japan.

Despite this, Yahoo's total market value is about $40 billion-a clear signal that Wall Street doesn't think much of Yahoo's core business. The market is showing "significant skepticism about the company's strategy," Starboard wrote in a letter to Yahoo. It's hard to argue with that.

(Starboard actually contends that the market gives a negative value to Yahoo's core. Some analysts disagree, as any sale of its stakes in Alibaba or Yahoo Japan would come along with hefty tax bills. The debate over exactly how to value Yahoo's Asian assets has been going on for years.)

The hedge fund has taken specific aim at the $1.3 billion that Mayer spent on acquisitions as she worked to reignite growth at Yahoo. Those acquisitions have failed to deliver, Starboard contends, and it wants Mayer to stop buying companies. Starboard does not mention the social network Tumblr specifically, but Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for that company in May 2013. It's clearly the deal that Starboard is singling out.

Yahoo vigorously defended its actions.

"Tumblr has been important from a consumer standpoint, an editorial standpoint, an advertising standpoint, and a technology standpoint," Kathy Savitt, Yahoo's chief marketing officer, said in an interview.

Traffic at Tumblr has grown by about a third to 400 million monthly users since last year's acquisition, and the numbers of blogs and posts have nearly doubled, according to the company's own figures. Savitt noted that while Tumblr operates independently, Yahoo and Tumblr have collaborated in productive ways. Yahoo's ad technology now powers Tumblr's "sponsored posts," which are the main vehicle for monetizing the microblogging platform. Tumblr-sponsored posts from brands like Lipton, Lexus, and Lionsgate appear on Yahoo. "Brands are able to create rich stories that are engaging in their own right," Savitt said. Yahoo has used the Tumblr platform for some of its own digital magazines.

Tumblr has allowed Yahoo to bring those magazines-which span categories such as technology, travel, food, style, beauty, and movies-to market faster, Savitt said. It also allowed Yahoo's editorial teams to produce richer content. With Tumblr, the company has been able to tap into a younger audience, which is important to Yahoo's future, Savitt said.

What Savitt wouldn't say is what any of this means in dollars. Analysts believe it's not much.

"Tumblr is relatively inconsequential," said Ben Schachter, a long-time Yahoo analyst at Macquarie Securities. "They continue to lose share of dollars and mindshare. They haven't been able to execute a turnaround. A lot of the new strategy is the same as the old strategy and it's not working yet."

Schachter said Tumblr had approximately $10 million to $15 million in revenue at the time of the acquisition, and since Yahoo has not updated the numbers, revenue has likely not grown by much. Even if Tumblr revenue had grown, say, twice as fast as traffic, it would have added only single-digit millions to the company's revenues.

Mark Mahaney, another veteran Yahoo analyst who works at RBC Capital Markets, was only slightly more cautious, though he also described Tumblr as "inconsequential."

"It's very hard to judge externally how successful the asset has been," Mahaney said. Once a company like Tumblr is acquired, the outside world gets very little visibility into its operations unless the acquisition is a major hit, Mahaney said. The lack of disclosure from Yahoo suggests Tumblr falls far short of that.

If Tumblr hasn't moved the needle, does that imply, as Starboard says, that Mayer should stop acquiring companies? Not necessarily.

For one thing, it can take time for an acquisition to live up to its potential. To wit: For years, investors criticized Google's $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube as the video sharing site struggled with monetization. Today, YouTube has morphed into a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and most everyone thinks the deal was a huge coup for Google. Similarly, it took years for Yahoo's modest Alibaba deal in 2005 to reveal its full potential.

"We are at very excited about our early progress with our synergies between the companies, and there is a lot more to come," Savitt said. "It's very premature to be judging it on numbers. I don't think that's a fair to look at it right now."

Acquisitions can also be an important tool in turnarounds.

"This company needs to recover growth to be relevant in the Internet space," Mahaney said. "Acquisitions can be a very legitimate part of that strategy. The question is whether they should consider something larger."

In other words, Tumblr may have been too small, and Mayer should go for something bigger-as her counterpart at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, did when he shelled out some $19 billion for WhatsApp. With the windfall from the Alibaba IPO, maybe now is the time. Yelp? Snapchat? Perhaps Mayer will offer us a hint when she speaks to Fast Company editor Bob Safian on Thursday as part of New York's annual Advertising Week.

To be fair, Mayer never pitched Tumblr as a "transformative" acquisition. It was a modest bet, Mahaney said, that "we haven't seen pay off."

On that last point, there's plenty of agreement.

"I've never had an investor call me to say, 'We're more bullish on Yahoo because they bought Tumblr,'" Schachter said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The activist hedge fund has stepped up its attack on Yahoo (YHOO) and its CEO Marissa Mayer, and it's not hard to see why. Following the initial public offering of the e-commerce company Alibaba (BABA), Yahoo netted $9.4 billion. It retains a stake worth approximately $32 billion in the Chinese company.

# data[].attributes.body
When: 2016

Impact: Updated software caused a breach in security.

Why: When making iOS 9 Apple was trying to fix the bugs that would be brought to their attention by customers using the new software, they would update the software in hopes that the bugs would be fixed, but by doing so they caused a breach in the security of the product.

Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2016/04/06/apple-ios-9-3-1-security-problem/#3962747629da

Jennifer Ewen

# data[].attributes.body
When: 2016

Impact: FCA was forced to recall almost 50,000 small SUV's

Why: There was a  problem with the camshaft/crankshaft sensor that may have caused the vehicle to either stall while moving or fail to start altogether.

Link: http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/chrysler/2016/12/23/fiat-chrysler-recall/95787018/

Nattany Aka

# data[].attributes.body
When: 2004

Impact: The project eventually cost HP $160 million in order backlogs and lost revenue—more than five times the project's estimated cost.

Why: HP tried to centralize  its disparate North American ERP systems onto one SAP system. The project managers knew all of the things that could go wrong with their ERP rollout. But they just didn't plan for so many of them to happen at once. Said Gilles Bouchard, then-CIO of HP's global operations: "We had a series of small problems, none of which individually would have been too much to handle. But together they created the perfect storm."

http://www.cio.com/article/2429865/enterprise-resource-planning/10-famous-erp-disasters--dustups-and-disappointments.html

Min Xu

# data[].attributes.headline
ERP Software Malfunction in U.S. Universities

# data[].attributes.subject
ERP Software Malfunction in U.S. Universities

# data[].attributes.body
When: September 2000

Back in 2000, students at the University of Massachusetts, Stanford University, and Indiana implemented a new ERP software which was supposed to make student's lives easier (much like FOL and webadvisor combined).  The entire system was filled with so many bugs and errors, students had issues with everything from accessing their class schedules to being unable to collect their student loan cheques.  It was eventually resolved a few days later, and all the students ended up getting access to their money and class schedules.  But for the first three days of classes, most of the lecture halls were only half full and the campuses were in a complete state of disarray from no one knowing where to be or what to do.

M. Dunbar

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When Stefanie Fillers returned to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst campus last fall, she needed to log into the school's new online registration system, called Spire, to make certain that the courses she had signed up for would allow her to graduate. She also wanted to waive her participation in UMass's health insurance plan. So when Spire crashed the day before classes began, Fillers, a senior, was annoyed. But at least she knew where her classes were-unlike most first-year students.

"The freshmen were going crazy because they didn't know where to go," Fillers says. The Spire system allows all 24,000 students at the Amherst campus to register for classes and perform other online activities. So when it crashed as the result of a PeopleSoft Web portal implementation that had been rushed, classes were half-empty for the first three days of the semester. And there were long lines everywhere you looked.

Around the same time, returning Stanford University students were also welcomed by a nonfunctioning Web portal that prevented them from finding out where their classes were. And some 3,000 students at Indiana University were denied financial aid by a buggy new ERP system, even though they had already received loan commitments. While the IT department and financial aid administrators scrambled to fix the bugs in the complex system, short-term loans were processed for those cash-strapped coeds who needed to pay for classes, rent and food.

These recent campus meltdowns illustrate how the growing reliance on expensive ERP systems has created nightmare scenarios for some college CIOs. In every case, the new systems are designed to centralize business processes in what historically has been a hodgepodge of siloed legacy systems. And indeed, that's exactly why college administrators are drawn to ERP systems. They drool over the integrated views that an ERP system offers of finance, HR, student records, financial aid and more.

But those same officials often fail to see the enormous cultural and technical obstacles that can delay-and even cripple-such ambitious implementations. A recent survey found that university ERP implementations have taken far longer than expected and cost five times more than what the projected price tag was. "There are a lot of people who have scar tissue" from ERP failures, says Bob Weir, vice president of IS at Northeastern University-including himself.

ERP implementations are difficult, even in very top-down corporate environments. Getting them to work in universities, which are essentially a conglomeration of decentralized fiefdoms, is nearly impossible. Staff in the largely autonomous departments do not cotton well to the one-size-fits-all strategy of an ERP implementation. Yet for universities, developing all software in-house is not an option. These nonprofit organizations simply don't have the talent and financial resources to create and manage a robust enterprise system. Indeed, representatives from PeopleSoft, which dominates the higher education market for ERP, say that a large part of the problem results from the inexperience of university IT departments and their tendency to rush implementations and inadequately test the new systems.

There is, however, a workable alternative, according to some university CIOs who have endured ERP implementations and lived to tell about it. And that is using an integration middleware layer to stitch together a number of best-of-breed applications. In this environment, the integration layer allows CIOs to plug legacy systems into newer Web-based applications. Northeastern's Weir is using this approach to provide state-of-the-art systems for NU's students and administrators.

"The beauty of the Web is that you can do it all behind the curtain, using a relatively steady interface," he says.

ERP or Bust

By the mid-1990s, most college administrative systems were a disconnected mess of legacy applications. Forward-thinking administrators knew that they needed to graduate their aging homegrown systems. College administrators loved the idea of having an HR management, financial and student administration system that could unite offices and departments. PeopleSoft was one of the first ERP vendors to promise that views into financial aid information, class enrollment and registration data, staff benefits and faculty course loads would be available in real-time, with increased efficiencies and reduced costs.

The pitch worked.

At the end of 2004, PeopleSoft could boast more than 730 college and university installations, and it was the clear leader in higher ed. However, universities also purchased financial systems from other vendors. One university that bought into the ERP pitch early on was Cleveland State, and it now serves as a cautionary tale for CIOs. In a suit Cleveland State filed against PeopleSoft, the university alleged that the vendor sold it virtually unusable software that caused Cleveland State to lose millions of dollars in revenue because it couldn't collect accounts receivables, and subsequently, it had to install other software to do the job. (On Feb. 25, Oracle-which has since acquired PeopleSoft-and Cleveland State settled; news sources estimate the undisclosed settlement at $4.25 million.)

Northeastern is another university that succumbed to the ERP siren song, initially at least. The urban Boston university had long-term plans to reinvent itself into a U.S. News & World Report top 100 institution, and at the heart of this overhaul would be PeopleSoft software. "My predecessor and his boss bought it hook, line and sinker," Weir says. Northeastern's former president and the head of IS purchased 22 modules and wanted them installed by Y2K.

In 1998, with his predecessors shown the door and an IS department in disarray, Weir took the top IT job at Northeastern. The new administration charged him with getting the derailed ERP project back on track. The first thing Weir did was bring the administration's expectations back to reality. Instead of installing 22 modules before Y2K, Weir scaled back the plan to just one: PeopleSoft's HR application would replace the noncompliant Y2K homegrown app. He further winnowed the scope down to exclude Northeastern's 11,000 part-time employees from the HR application; only the 4,000 full-time employees would be in the upgraded system for now. "We had a Y2K deadline, and we bludgeoned our way to the goal," Weir says.

He managed to get through Y2K, but a major question remained: How would he handle the other enterprise system rollouts staring him in the face?

Standardizing at Stanford

Like Northeastern, Stanford University also bought into the late '90s enterprise software pitch. But unlike Northeastern, Stanford never slowed down its implementation engine. "In hindsight, we tried to do too much in too little time," says Randy Livingston, Stanford's vice president of business affairs and CFO.

Starting in 2001, Stanford implemented student administration systems, PeopleSoft HR, Oracle financials and several other ancillary applications. Four years later, users still complain that they have lower productivity with the new systems than with the previous ones, which were supported by a highly customized mainframe. Users also have had difficulties in accessing critical information on a timely basis. Livingston says many transactions-such as initiating a purchase requisition or requesting a reimbursement-take longer for users to do than with the prior legacy system.

Stanford has also not realized any of the projected savings the vendors promised. "We are finding that the new ERP applications cost considerably more to support than our legacy applications," Livingston says. And he doesn't know how much it will cost to get the enterprise systems working at the level everyone was accustomed to.

But Stanford's biggest problem is that its IT department is still trying to get campuswide buy-in for the enterprise applications, which have necessitated new ways of doing business. And that either leads to nonuse of the new systems or costly customizations to keep everyone happy. For example, Stanford's law school operates on a semester schedule, while the other six schools operate on a trimester schedule. "This means that every aspect of the student administration system needs to be configured differently for the law school," Livingston says. Within the schools, some faculty are paid a 12-month salary; other schools pay by nine months, 10 months or 11 months. "The standard HR payroll system is not designed to handle all these unusual pay schedules," Livingston says.

Livingston has his work cut out for him now that his CIO, Chris Handley, resigned in December 2004 and forced him to take over the IT reins. Livingston has since reorganized the IT department, which he hopes will be better able to manage the enterprise projects going forward. He created a separate administrative systems group that will report directly to him, with responsibility for development, integration and support of the major ERP systems.

The hurdles Stanford and other universities face with the new ERP system are largely cultural ones. For instance, lean staffs and tight budgets at most university campuses usually lead to a lack of proper training and systems testing. At Stanford, Livingston says that plenty of training was offered, but many users didn't take it. He has set up new training programs, including a group who sits side by side with users to help them learn how to do certain complex tasks; periodic user group meetings; website and e-mail lists that offer more help; and expert users embedded in the various departments who aid their colleagues.

Stanford's IT was still struggling with integrating the enterprise systems when the newly launched PeopleSoft Web portal (called Axess) crashed last fall. Like the new UMass portal, Axess couldn't handle the load of all the returning students trying to log in to the untested Web-based system at the same time, Livingston says. Stanford was able to fix those problems relatively quickly, but Livingston and his staff continue to struggle with the enterprise projects. The university's departments remain "highly suspicious and resistant" of his efforts to standardize and centralize business processes, Livingston says.

Overloaded at Umass

At the University of Massachusetts, IT hoped to originally have the Web portal rollout installed by March 2004. Delays in testing the Spire system, however, forced them up against an immovable deadline: the return of 24,000 students to campus over Labor Day weekend.

By midday Tuesday, after some periods of slowness, "the system choked," says John Dubach, CIO at UMass-Amherst. It stayed down for a long four days at the most crucial time of the year-when students needed to add or drop classes and find out where their classes were on campus.

Dubach would later realize that his staff did not do enough load testing on Spire. A configuration problem with the password system also reared its ugly head. An explanatory e-mail had been sent out to the students, informing them of the password requirements in the new system. It turns out no one read the e-mail, and therefore, students flooded the "I forgot my password" option because they couldn't log in. After about a thousand of these requests, the system buckled. "We didn't test for a thousand password requests," Dubach says.

The opening day nightmare was compounded by the fact that PeopleSoft seemed unable to help. "We were looking for help left and right," Dubach says. "PeopleSoft had suggestions but no solutions to anything. They hadn't had that much experience with the portal in this type of environment."

PeopleSoft representatives see it differently. Jim McGlothlin, now a vice president with Oracle who also worked for PeopleSoft, says that onsite consultants for the vendor did help UMass out. McGlothlin says universities sometimes experience problems with the software because of their tight deadlines and inadequate load testing of the new system. "You need to allow a couple of weeks to do proper load testing," he says.

After four long days and nights, Dubach and his staff were able to corner most of the problems. Students and faculty were allowed back onto the system without restriction the following Monday. A few periods of slowness raised the anxiety levels during the weeks after, but the system never went down again. Dubach reports that student registration in November for spring '05 classes went smoothly.

Dubach took away some valuable lessons. First off, he says he was naive about the amount of testing and fine-tuning such a new and intensive system demanded. In the future, Dubach says, he will try to coordinate hardware upgrades with application upgrades. When he buys new hardware, he will install the software upgrades on the new hardware, test it and have it working perfectly before he replaces the old systems with the new ones.

While Dubach says he is going to stick it out with PeopleSoft, in large part because UMass has already purchased the software licenses, some university CIOs say there is an easier way.

Middleware to the Rescue

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When Stefanie Fillers returned to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst campus last fall, she needed to log into the school's new online registration system, called Spire, to make certain that the courses she had signed up for would allow her to graduate. She also wanted to waive her participation in UMass's health insurance plan.

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Nike’s Supply Chain IssuesWhen: - 2000 - 2001 Impact: - They spent $400 million dollars updating their supply chain system, Demand forecasting was one of the biggest issues. Demand for a number of products and locations was either overestimated or underestimated. The company reported a loss of $100 million in sales in the 3rd quarter of 2001 due to this problem.Why: - they implement a new demand planning software solution without testing it and everything went wrong. Rather than helping Nike match their supply with demand, narrowing their sneaker manufacturing cycle, they ended up ordering low-selling sneakers in place of high demand ones, collapsing the supply chain.http://www.cio.com/article/2439601/supply-chain-management/nike-rebounds--how--and-why--nike-recovered-from-its-supply-chain-disaster.html

# data[].attributes.subject
Nike’s Supply Chain IssuesWhen: - 2000 - 2001 Impact: - They spent $400 million dollars updating their supply chain system, Demand forecasting was one of the biggest issues. Demand for a number of products and locations was either overestimated or underestimated. The company reported a loss of $100 million in sales in the 3rd quarter of 2001 due to this problem.Why: - they implement a new demand planning software solution without testing it and everything went wrong. Rather than helping Nike match their supply with demand, narrowing their sneaker manufacturing cycle, they ended up ordering low-selling sneakers in place of high demand ones, collapsing the supply chain.http://www.cio.com/article/2439601/supply-chain-management/nike-rebounds--how--and-why--nike-recovered-from-its-supply-chain-disaster.html

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:- Jay Patel

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A technology failure that occurred to me was when my iPhone 6s had a problem with the battery and my phone would simultaneously shut down at critical times I needed phone access.  I had an experience when i was in a foreign city and needed directions and my phone shut down and resulted in much difficulty to find my way around the city. The reason this was occurring to my phone was apple had made a recall on its iPhone 6s battery. The cause is the battery shit down was mainly caused by the hardware of the battery not being able to handle the stress multiple of multiple apps being used at the same time. The problem was resolved in a replacement phone.
O. Youssef

http://fortune.com/2017/01/25/apple-iphone-6-battery-recall/

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When: 2015

Impact: Two wheeled, self balancing scooters started catching fire as soon as riders ride on the board causing explosions. Over 60 reports of fire caused the company the loss of $2 million dollars.

Why: These hover-boards use lithium batteries inside them which is highly flammable. There was not a proper separation of sort circuit. Only a small piece of plastic was used which melted easily. So while charging it generated too much heat Melting the plastic and setting it up on fire. After these incident hover-boards were banned to be shipped by air as well.

B. Jain

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"Back to the Future Part II" got it partly right. As of 2015, the hoverboard is a real form of transportation that lets trendy kids get into trouble while effortlessly zipping along the sidewalk. There are a handful of important differences, though. These self-balancing scooters don't actually hover like the ones in the movie.

Also, they could potentially catch on fire and burn your house down.

The US airline industry has decided not to take any chances: American, Alaska, Delta, Hawaiian, JetBlue, Southwest and United Airlines have banned hoverboards on passenger flights, and the US Postal Service has stopped shipping hoverboards by air as well. Amazon and Target both temporarily suspended sales, and Overstock.com has stopped selling hoverboards at all.

What the heck is going on? Keep reading.

Hoverboards have become one of the hottest news stories this holiday season, and not just because they're selling like mad. According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, there have been 12 incidents in the United States where the lithium ion batteries in these hoverboards reportedly caught fire as of December 2015, destroying bedrooms and even entire homes. In July 2016, the CPSC updated that number to at least 60 reports of hoverboard fires totaling over $2 million in property damage.

The fires have started in all sorts of different circumstances, too. According to owners and witnesses, some of the hoverboards exploded while charging, others while riding and one while it was simply sitting near a kiosk in a Washington shopping mall. (There have been several other hoverboard fires reported in the UK, and at least one in Hong Kong.)

Here's the really scary part: there's no single reason why these hoverboards are exploding, and there's no sure-fire way to avoid potential catastrophe if you want to buy one yourself. There's no particular brand of hoverboard to avoid -- they all seem to come from thousands of interchangeable factories in China -- or any label on the box that guarantees a product won't explode. And much of the advice we've seen issued by local fire departments and government agencies isn't likely to help.

For instance, officials have been warning that you should only use the charger that comes in the box. That sounds like common sense -- until you realize that these hoverboards tend to use a plug you won't find on any other type of device. Since you're so restricted when it comes to which type of charger you can use, it's pretty unlikely that any of these fires occurred due to someone mistaking a laptop charger for a hoverboard one.

Similarly, many officials now warn against overcharging hoverboards, but when was the last time you had to think about overcharging a gadget? With modern laptops and smartphones, you simply plug them in and leave them there, trusting that they'll automatically shut off the flow of electricity when they're done.

While the US Consumer Product Safety Commission was on the case as of December 2015 to figure out the actual root causes of these incidents, they didn't have the answers when we first published this story. "We want to be able to deliver for the public, but we hope they'll be able to appreciate that what's going on right now is a very thorough science-based investigation," said CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson in late 2015.

But in February 2016, the organization officially warned that hoverboards pose a serious risk, and threatened to block imports or recall hoverboards that don't meet voluntary safety standards.

And in July 2016, the CPSC followed through on that threat, recalling half a million hoverboards in the United States. The cause: overheating lithium-ion batteries.

The science

The science behind hoverboard fires is actually pretty simple, and fairly well understood. Much like your laptop, tablet or phone, these hoverboards use lithium ion battery packs for their power, and it just so happens that the liquid swimming around inside most lithium ion batteries is highly flammable. If the battery short-circuits -- say, by puncturing the incredibly thin sheet of plastic separating the positive and negative sides of the battery -- the liquid electrolyte can heat up so quickly that the battery explodes.

You don't necessarily need to stab a lithium ion battery to set it on fire. A defective battery might have tiny sharp metal particles inside that could puncture the separator all on its own. "When this happens, especially when the batteries are charged, a lot of heat is generated inside the cells and this leads to electrolyte boiling, the rupture of the cell casing, and then a significant fire," Carnegie Mellon University materials science professor Jay Whitacre told Wired. You can see what a lithium ion battery fire looks like in our Droid Turbo 2 torture test video:

It shouldn't be a revelation that lithium ion batteries are volatile, because fires like these aren't exactly new. We've been living with potentially deadly explosions in our pockets and laptop bags for years. In 2004, a spike in the number of cell phone battery explosions prompted this CNET report, and Dell recalled millions of laptop batteries in 2006 after just six incidents of fire. More recently, Boeing had to ground the 787 Dreamliner airplane until it could find a way to keep its lithium ion batteries from overheating.

Safety standards, or the lack thereof

If lithium ion batteries are so volatile, why are we still using them today? The traditional argument is that the energy density of lithium ion batteries is significantly higher than batteries that use less flammable materials. (In other words, a lithium ion battery can be smaller, lighter, and/or last longer than say, a lithium iron phosphate one.)

Another reason is the consumer electronics industry has gotten much better about safety standards, to the point where most of us don't think twice about leaving a phone connected to a charger. "We said to the companies, you need to come together, create a voluntary organization and set a safety standard," says the CPSC's Wolfson, recalling how we went from big battery scares and recalls in the mid-2000s to the relatively safe laptops and phones we have today.

Most modern batteries now incorporate all kinds of safety measures, such as emergency vents, and many products filled with lithium ion batteries have to endure a barrage of drop tests, crush tests and electrical stress tests before they can pass.

But hoverboards are brand-new. "It's a product without a safety standard," says Wolfson.

Sean Kane, a longtime product safety researcher, says cases like the hoverboard are precisely why his nonprofit organization The Safety Institute is advocating for more general categories of safety standards like "computers" and "personal mobility devices" instead of the specific ones that exist today.

There are existing standards for motorized scooters and toys, says Kane, but the hoverboard just doesn't fit. "What you have is a product coming in here where no one knows which safety standards are applicable."

For now, retailers like Amazon and Target are making sure individual components of these hoverboards -- namely the batteries and the chargers -- have been certified for safety. (As of December 2015, Amazon asked that all hoverboard sellers provide proof they comply with UN 38.3, UL 1642 and UL 60950-1, specifically.)

But before you breathe a sigh of relief, you should probably know that while batteries and chargers can be certified individually, it doesn't mean those hoverboards have been certified as a whole. Until those parts have actually been tested together, it's more of a legal cover-your-ass measure for the manufacturers and retailers than anything else.

And you might not be able to find a hoverboard that's been tested in its entirety by a reputable independent firm like Underwriters Laboratories (UL) even if you looked hard. Swagway, one of the more popular brands, claims its entire hoverboard is UL-certified because it has a UL-certified battery and a UL-certified charger inside, but that's not accurate. "There are presently no UL-certified hoverboards," says UL consumer safety director John Drengenberg. (Incidentally, Swagway is now facing a lawsuit from when one of its hoverboards caught fire.)

Besides, there's another problem with certifying batteries instead of the hoverboards themselves. There's no easy way to tell what kind of battery is inside a hoverboard -- or if it's a counterfeit.
Update, March 2016: Underwriters Laboratories now has a testing procedure for hoverboards, UL 2272, and we got an early look at how it works. Also, some self-balancing scooter companies now claim to follow that standard. See the UL's testing procedure in the video below.

Supply and demand

When an increased number of cell phone batteries were bursting in 2004, many blamed cheap counterfeits made in China -- batteries produced with far less stringent standards than phone manufacturers might have wanted.

That's a popular theory when it comes to the hoverboard fires, too. "There are some factories right now that will say they use Samsung batteries, but don't," a sales manager for Chinese hoverboard manufacturer CHIC told Quartz. "They wrap a piece of paper around the battery that says 'Samsung' when it's not Samsung."

But unlike cell phones, it's not like we have known reputable hoverboard manufacturers that merely got a bad batch of batteries to go with their own carefully designed proprietary components. Even the top hoverboard brands -- Phunkeeduck, IO Hawk, Swagway -- are ones you've probably never heard of, ones that sprang up out of nowhere to take advantage of the hoverboard craze.

And those companies are merely distributors for a sprawling array of factories in China that supply components to one another practically interchangeably.

That's not a reflection on the quality of Chinese manufacturing in general, by the way. Practically every high-quality Apple product comes off a Chinese assembly line, not to mention those of Lenovo, a Chinese company that's one of the top worldwide computer vendors. But China has also become famous as a place where tiny factories can pile onto a hot new idea like the selfie stick or the miniature R/C helicopter, churning out copycats in record time.

By the time the hoverboard fad took off in the United States, there were already too many Chinese companies building hoverboards to tell who came up with the idea first. Practically every hoverboard you see is a counterfeit, in that sense.

"Right now there are thousands of workshops making identical hoverboards in China, and the only obvious differentiator is the costs," says Jay Sung, CEO of popular electric-scooter company EcoReco. And since there are so many different ways these Chinese companies could have cut costs among the different components they trade with one another and piece together to form the final product you see, it's hard to narrow down the actual point of failure.

So far, some reports have blamed the batteries, others the cables, but we don't know for sure. The UK divisions of retailers Amazon and Costco are specifically telling customers to destroy charging cables that have plugs that weren't built to UK safety standards. (Costco is providing replacement cables, while Amazon is offering full refunds.)

Another possible culprit is the cut-off switch, a safety feature that keeps an electronic device from overcharging, which the UK's National Trading Standards consumer protection agency says can often fail in these hoverboards. EcoReco's Sung suggested that to save costs, some hoverboard manufacturers might not even include a cut-off switch to begin with. That's clearly not the issue everywhere, though, as Mashable recently tore down a Swagway hoverboard that appeared to have a cut-off switch installed.

What happens now
Original story published December 22, 2015 Update, January 21 at 2:27 p.m. PT: Update, February 20 at 1:15 p.m. PT: Update, June 8 at 4:02 p.m. PT: Update, July 9 at 3:43 p.m. PT: The CPSC has officially recalled half a million hoverboards due to lithium-ion batteries that were found prone to overheating. The first hoverboards meeting UL's new safety standard are now on sale in the United States. The CPSC has officially warned that hoverboards that don't meet voluntary safety standards pose "an unreasonable risk of fire," and has threatened to recall or ban imports if manufacturers don't follow those standards. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission is now investigating at least 40 reports of hoverboard fires across 19 US states.
In the UK, the government is already cracking down on hoverboards. Not only is it illegal to ride one on public roads or walkways, but the UK National Trading Standards body has now seized and reportedly destroyed 32,000 hoverboards in December 2015 -- the vast majority of the 38,800 devices that the organization has been tracking since it started investigating the devices in October of that year.

In the United States, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has now recalled half a million hoverboards, and is pushing for voluntary standards like the ones that made laptops and phones safer today.

It could also be that the CPSC pushes to ban hoverboards altogether. It wouldn't be the first time a popular product was deemed too unsafe to sell. There are good reasons that lawn darts and magnetic Buckyballs, both popular toys, were banned. (Fires aren't the only reason that hoverboards are dangerous. The CPSC has received "dozens" of reports of injuries from falls from US hospital emergency rooms as of December 2015.)

Perhaps next time, we could reserve the name "hoverboard" for a gadget that actually floats above the ground.

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Here are the reasons why so many hoverboards are catching fire

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Back to the Future Part II" got it partly right. As of 2015, the hoverboard is a real form of transportation that lets trendy kids get into trouble while effortlessly zipping along the sidewalk. There are a handful of important differences, though. These self-balancing scooters don't actually hover like the ones in the movie.

# data[].attributes.body
When: 2014

Impact: More than 1,450 flights were delayed and 168 cancelled. Customers had to stay another day in the city until Southwest could get their planes going again

Why: The Southwest Airlines,  technical disruptions grounded some planes, blocked use of its website and prevented travelers from checking in for flights

Link:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-20/southwest-says-technology-failures-disrupt-flights-check-ins

V. McFadden

# data[].attributes.body
When:2016

Impact: 35 reports of phones overheating (one smoking and caused an evacuation of an airplane). There were also reports on phones catching on fire. They recalled 2.5 million devices and the consumers were told to return the phones immediately

Why: Company blamed assembly defects that caused the phones lithium ion battery to overheat.

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603191/the-biggest-technology-failures-of-2016/?set=602944
S. Marenchuk

# data[].attributes.body
When: 2013

Impact: $100M and $125M write-down on Balance Sheet

Why: The software did not work with Avon's business model.

Link: http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/avon-pulls-plug-on-$125-million-sap-project/d/d-id/1113061

Rosalyn M. Di Cesare