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Taking the Bull by the Horns
7/20/2006
Did that development work help lead to your current involvement in Kuali? As part of succession planning, we completed a more recent scan of available administrative packages, which really haven’t made much progress. They’re still monolithic systems; one size fits all. And you can’t get your own functionality, so you end up changing your business processes or changing the system greatly. I was very discouraged by that.
Then, in December 2004, Delta President Raúl Rodríguez and I attended the Open Source Summit [see here] in Scottsdale, AZ, hosted by rSmart. We went to the presentation on Sakai, and things just started clicking. While there, we went to lunch with John Robinson, the founder of rSmart, and Barry Walsh, [director of university information systems] from Indiana University. Barry told the story of Kuali, and I told the story of our development at Delta. Little did either side realize, we were really interviewing each other. After about 20 minutes, Barry said, “What are your thoughts about Kuali?” and our president said, “We’ll do it!”
How d'es that fit into Delta’s priorities? Your institution now has a big commitment as a founding partner in Kuali; is that a risk? Well, it’s a half million dollars, between funds and dedicated resources. But when we looked at our strategic goals for the year, out of 250 initiatives, Kuali came up number one, and it was funded. Obviously, a lot of this had to do with Dr. Rodríguez’s passion for it. But, as he says, Oracle and PeopleSoft have been around for maybe 15 or 20 years at the most. Our partner schools like Indiana University have been around for 160 years, and Delta has been around for 60. So, we’re not worried that Indiana, Cornell (NY), or the others are going to go out of business any time soon. In that sense [community source is] actually more secure than going to a vendor.
What has your institution’s Kuali partnership experience been like, thus far? Initially, we thought we might get swallowed up by the large universities involved. But it’s clear to us now that it’s a level playing field. What’s important are your ideas, your ability to produce, and how you get along with the community. We have more than held our own. Another good thing: We’ve found that Kuali is totally driven by the functional people. They decide how the system should operate and behave, and the developers have to come through.
What’s happening at this point in time with Kuali? We’ve completed our first deliverable, which is our test drive. The approach is service-oriented architecture, where you can tailor the system to your needs and you have the ability to change. And we’ve eliminated anything proprietary: You can get everything you need for Kuali development, free. By July ’07 or early ’08, we’ll have a full-fledged financial system, ready to install.
What about a community source student information system? Is that a possibility, and if so, will Delta be part of that effort? We believe this is the big one, and one we are anxious to do. We’ve had a number of meetings with the other interested schools about whether it’s feasible to build an SIS in pure service-oriented architecture and what kind of attention it would attract. Responses were quite positive. Plus, we’ve identified vendors who may be willing to partner with us on open source code, so we won’t be starting from scratch. But without question, Delta will be part of this next initiative.
Do you feel you’ll continue to “take the bull by the horns” as you approach new challenges like a community source student information system? My president and I have a great partnership, and our team at the college is so good; they’re the ones making this happen. It’s a passion, how much we believe in [community source]. We all believe that we’re onto something big.
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