Case Study III-4 • The Kuali Financial System: An Open-Source Project 457wonderful metaphor for administrative systems in a
university—humble but essential.There have been a number of attempts by higher
education institutions to band together to jointly develop
systems and before Sakai most of them turned out to be
failures. But not only has Sakai held together, but it has
continued to grow stronger and stronger, and Kuali fol-
lowed in Sakai’s footsteps. Wheeler explains why these
projects have been successful:We are held together by enlightened self-interest.
Through Kuali, Indiana is getting a system that costs
$8 million for an investment of a little more than
$2.5 million, and all of the other partners can make
that same claim or better. And this cost advantage
will hold for the entire life of the system—we will be
sharing the cost of maintaining the system, which is
the dominant part of the total life cycle cost.
Also, we feel strongly that we are a community
of institutions that are not just interested in ourselves,
but care about each other and are making a significant
contribution to the welfare of the entire higher educa-
tion community. That has been a very energizing
motivation.
Furthermore, we are starting from a proven sys-
tem, upgrading it to modern technology, and modifying
it where necessary to make it suitable for everyone, not
just IU. If we had tried to start with a clean slate, we
would still be debating the functional specifications.
Finally, we have taken a date-driven approach to
the software development. In system development
there is an immutable relationship between completion
date, resources employed, and functionality. Problems
inevitably arise and you must delay completion, add
more resources, or reduce the functionality of the sys-
tem. We have chosen to keep the completion date and
the resources employed relatively fixed and when nec-
essary reduce the functionality of the current release of
the system. There will be later releases, and the miss-
ing functionality can be added to the next release. In
the meantime the users have a system that they can use.The release of the basic modules of the Kuali Financial
System occurred in October 2006. The second release was in
November 2007, and the complete system was released in
November 2009 and is being implemented by the partner
institutions and a number of other universities.Legal Issues
Getting approval from the legal department of each of the
Kuali partner institutions was a chore. The role of lawyersofficers that concluded that there was “affirmative ambiva-
lence” about building open-source financial systems for uni-
versities. The proponents took that as a ringing endorsement
and ploughed ahead.
One problem with selling this idea to university finan-
cial officers was that they had little understanding of the
term “open source,” and even less understanding of what
was being proposed. Wheeler recalls:
In May of 2004 I went to a meeting in Chicago of finan-
cial officers and IT officers that was jointly convened
by the two professional societies. When we said open
source to these people the image in their minds was of
strange people in foreign countries who dress funny
making changes to their mission-critical systems by
dark of night. It was very clear that there was a chasm
in understanding what open source actually meant, so
we explained to them that we were really talking about
our developers in our institutions creating the software
with rigorous processes and structured releases. So to
avoid confusion we quit using the term “open source”
and started using the term “community source” instead.Formation of the Kuali Partnership
In 2004 IU started to try to find some partners to develop a
community source financial system based on the IU FIS.
Hawaii joined up immediately, and NACUBO and the
rSmart Group said that they wanted to be involved. On
September 10, 2004, they announced the Kuali project.
Although there were not yet enough resources to go for-
ward with the development, they started planning the proj-
ect and having conversations with other potential partners.
The University of Arizona soon joined up, and in the next
six months San Joaquin Delta Community College,
Michigan State University, and Cornell came in. In March
2005 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced a
grant of $2.5 million to the Kuali project. Together with
the $5 million in development resources pledged by the
partner institutions, this grant brought the available
resources for the project close to its projected $8 million
cost, so Kuali was underway! The University of California
Office of the President, along with University of California
campuses at Davis, Irvine, and Santa Barbara, became a
partner in 2006 and contributed an additional $1 million.
Considerable effort went into the choice of the name
Kuali. According to Wheeler:
The name Kualicame from an intensive search. The
word Kualimeanswokin Malaysian. We thought that
was a very appropriate association because the wok is
an essential but very humble dish, and every Asian
kitchen has to have one. We thought that Kuali was a