WEIGHING OPTIONS FOR enterprise systems development,
the CIO of a large U.S. university recognized the
university’s legacy systems were practically obsolete.

In addition to their costly maintenance, they were failing to keep up with changes in the university’s processes. Moreover, their siloed structure raised barriers to information exchange across the university’s multiple schools and business units. From the CIO’s perspective, a new enterprise system was needed to bring the university’s information architecture up to speed. But how to achieve such an ambitious objective?

The decision was far from trivial. As highlighted by
Kvavik et al., 10 “Enterprise system implementation is
one of the single largest investments
higher education institutions ever
make.” Given the anticipated expense
and complexity, the CIO had to choose
from three options: revamp the exist-
ing systems in-house; acquire and
The Community
Source Approach to
Software
Development
and the Kuali
Experience
DOI: 10.1145/2593687

Participating educational institutions get
a much more cost-effective result compared
to the commercial off-the-shelf alternative.
BY MANLU LIU, SEAN HANSEN, AND QIANG TU
key insights

Institutions of higher education need a cost-effective, sustainable approach to managing enterprise information.

Community source is a novel approach to enterprise application development in which multiple institutions pool their resources toward common goals.

The goal of community source is shared value creation to ensure flexibility and innovative potential.

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