Delightful Progress: Kuali's Legacy of Community and Leadership
Grush: So Kuali is making work a more delightful experience for both its users and for its own developers?
Dehlin: Definitely. And today we're talking about users who are able to solve problems. People used to have to stand in line for developers to develop for them, but now they can just configure forms and workflows themselves. And they do all that in a safe way that IT feels great about.
Today we're talking about users who are able to solve problems. People used to have to stand in line for developers to develop for them, but now they can just configure forms and workflows themselves.
Grush: Please tell us a bit about how the cloud has affected Kuali development.
Dehlin: We got our start by providing the code to institutions who would have developers customize it. We found that institutions would quickly get out of sync with the latest code base, and then wouldn't be using the latest features, enhancements, bug fixes, and security patches because they had customized so much that they couldn't reintegrate our code with theirs. Our customers told us plainly that they valued speed of development and richness of feature sets over optimizing for local hosting.
We turned our focus to becoming a cloud company. At first, we took the original Kuali code and hosted it in AWS on behalf of our customers. We standardized all of the customers on the same code, but we were hosting an instance for each customer. Technically, it was in the "cloud," but it wasn't yet a multi-tenant system. We had one code base for sponsored programs, another code base for compliance, another for curriculum management, another for business continuity, and so on.
As we signed up more and more customers, we ultimately created single-instance, multi-tenant cloud solutions.
The next thing we found is that the multi-tenant, one cloud system that we created for sponsored programs was very similar in many ways to the ones we created for compliance, and similar to the ones that we created for continuity planning, and similar to the ones we created for curriculum management, and so forth…
So we unified them all. And that's one reason why the experience across solutions is so similar — it's the same code base.
Once you've integrated single sign-on with one of our products, it works with all of our products. Once you've created an integration to the SIS with one of our products, it works with all of our products.
And once a person has been trained in how to do form or workflow design on one of our products, they know how to do it for all of our products. And as I said, if a faculty member, staff, student, or family member has to fill out more than one form from any of our systems, they all work the same way. And all of that makes internal training, integrations, and implementations just so much faster.
Once a person has been trained in how to do form or workflow design on one of our products, they know how to do it for all of our products… that makes internal training, integrations, and implementations just so much faster.
Grush: That leads me back to strategies for the future. How are you looking toward the future in your development methodologies, as well as for the user experience?
Dehlin: I'll mention a couple of ways we're always thinking toward the future.
One began 10 years ago. When we first started the company, I would hear people talking about higher education institutions feeling like they're special snowflakes. And that was said in a bit of a derogatory way, as if that's a bad thing. My feeling is that there are very logical reasons why colleges and universities should want to do many things in different ways.
For example, Southern New Hampshire University and ASU, both Kuali.co customers, are very, very innovative in how they provide services to students. And they use our products in very, very innovative and different ways. One reason they're able to do that is because we've built software that supports universities and colleges doing things in the unique ways that they need to, safely so that they don't work themselves into a corner by over-customization.