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.
contributed articles