Managing Information Technology

Case Study III-4 • The Kuali Financial System: An Open-Source Project 459

large, complex financial systems when all the developers

and users are in the same organization, and the difficulties

are multiplied when both the users and the developers

come from different institutions with different cultures that

are spread out “from sea to shining sea.” Kuali is overcom-

ing these difficulties with innovative organizational and

management strategies. Exhibit 1 depicts the Kuali

Financial System project’s organization.

Kuali Commercial Affiliates

Although the Kuali Financial System is open-source soft-

ware that is available without cost, the partner institutions

have no intention of providing support services to adopters

of the Kuali system. The KFS is a large and complex sys-

tem, and it is not easy to install it to replace your existing

financial system. The partner institutions have worked at

developing the system and have the resources to install and

support it, but most other institutions need help to make it

successful. Thus, if the Kuali Financial System is to be

widely adopted, there must be other organizations to pro-

vide the necessary support services.

Not shown on the organization chart, but a very impor-

tant component of the Kuali effort, is the Kuali Commercial

Affiliates program. Commercial affiliates provide for-fee

guidance, support, implementation, and integration services

related to the Kuali software. Affiliates may offer packaged

among themselves, but it is not immediately obvious why
they would insist that it be freely available to all. One advan-
tage to the partners of making the software freely available
is that this increases the number of institutions using the
software and therefore increases the potential resources
available for maintaining the system. Since maintenance
costs are such an important component of a system’s total
life cycle cost, reducing that cost is a significant benefit.
And if you give up the idea of making money selling
the system, there is no cost to making it open source. But the
major reason that Kuali and Sakai are open source is that the
founders of these projects, including the Mellon Foundation,
believe that every dollar that higher education institutions
are spending for administrative systems is a dollar that can-
not be spent to support their teaching and research missions.
They are passionately committed to the welfare of the entire
higher education community and therefore to open-source
systems that can reduce the huge expenditures for adminis-
trative systems for everyone who would like to use them.

Organization of the Kuali Financials Project

As mentioned previously, the history of interinstitutional
cooperation to jointly produce software systems has been
littered with failures, so starting out to work together is no
guarantee of success. It is not easy to successfully develop

Technical

Council

Functional

Council

Kuali Board

Project

Director

Development

Team

Module 1

Development

Team

Module 2

Development

Team

Module N

EXHIBIT 1 Kuali Financials Project Organization