what they expected from me. This was also true for
the Development Managers in working both with
me and with their development teams. We had to get
to know each other better, understand preferred
communication and coordination mechanisms, and
adjust accordingly. This was particularly difficult in
the beginning but got much better over time.
We also had the logistical challenges of time
zones—I couldn’t schedule a nine o’clock meeting
because that is 4 A.M. in Hawaii. It helped that we had
people willing to flex their hours by staying later or
getting up earlier to accommodate certain meetings.
However, it was still challenging to make things as fair
as possible to everyone on the project. We also tried to
share the travel burden so that no one group ever had
to do all of the traveling for our face-to-face meetings.The Kuali Nervous System
The Kuali Nervous System (KNS) is a module that was
included as a part of Release 1 of the KFS, but it is unlike the
other modules. Rather, it is a core technical module com-
posed of reusable code components that provide common
pieces of functionality. It is a toolbox of components that are
commonly used across all the modules, such as looking up a
value in a table, authorization and authentication, adding
notes and attachments to a document, and other things that
are done over and over. For example, if you need to do a
lookup, you just call the lookup component and plug in the
right parameters.
The Kuali developers spent a great deal of time and
effort in the early stages of development designing and
developing these core components included in the nerv-
ous system. Then they could take those and quickly put
together what they call the skeleton, a very fundamental
outline of a given document or a given screen of an
application. They could put one of those together very
rapidly—a matter of half a day or a day. They have been
able to leverage that and develop things fairly quickly
later in the project because of it. They continue to add
components to the nervous system.
The KNS is a technical framework that enforces con-
sistency in the applications that use it. It promotes adherence
to the architectural principles and development standards
defined by the Kuali architects. The KNS also provides a
stable core of development tools providing a more efficient
development paradigm. Another way to think of it is that it
provides some standard approaches. In programming there
are always many ways to solve a problem, and if you leave
the choice of how to solve a problem up to developers, they
will come up with every different way possible. So the KNS
provides some standard ways of doing things, and that
makes the system a lot easier to maintain. And, since the
466 Part III • Acquiring Information Systems
components of the nervous system have been debugged, a
substantial proportion of new components will be bug-free
before system testing is begun.Kuali Rice
During the Kuali Financial System development, the devel-
opers recognized that the KNS, the workflow engine, and
other components of the KFS would be very useful for the
development of other systems. This led to the establishment
of a separately funded project to develop Kuali Rice, an
enterprise-class middleware suite of integrated products
that allows for applications to be built in an agile fashion.
Rice includes the Kuali Nervous System (KNS), Kuali
Enterprise Workflow (KEW), Kuali Enterprise Notification
(KEN) that notifies people of workflow items awaiting their
attention, Kuali Identity Management (KIM) that provides
identity management and access management services, and
the Kuali Service Bus (KSB) that facilitates interfacing
between applications and services that have been defined to
the bus.
Not only has the initial version of Rice been used
extensively in development of the KFS, but several institu-
tions have also been using it to develop new applications
and to adapt legacy applications to a paperless workflow
environment. More information about Rice is available at
the Kuali Foundation Web site, http://www.kuali.org.Further Developments
Before the official release of the KFS version 3.0 was avail-
able, Colorado State University and San Joaquin Delta
College implemented a prerelease version to replace their
old financial systems, and the other partner institutions
began to convert to the official version on their individual
schedules. In October 2009, the Naval Postgraduate School
installed the KFS, and several other institutions are in the
process of adopting the system.
Although implementation of any enterprise informa-
tion system is a big challenge, the implementations of
early KFS adopters have gone exceptionally smoothly. The
combination of support from the Kuali community and
commercial affiliates has been quite effective in preparing
for installation and in dealing with issues that arose during
conversion. For example, Colorado State found a serious
performance issue with the software and sent a message to
the Kuali e-mail list. Other institutions responded with
possible solutions to the problem, and the eventual solu-
tion was found the next day. According to Patrick Burns of
Colorado State, “It was just amazing. Whenever you want
help you just send an e-mail out and you get the whole
community jumping in to help you.”