Delightful Progress: Kuali's Legacy of Community and Leadership
A Q&A with Joel Dehlin
As CEO, Joel Dehlin has led Kuali.co through the past ten years, since its organization as a commercial company in 2014. Kuali has its early roots in the previous decade, beginning in 2004 as a project of the nonprofit Kuali Foundation that established its "by higher education for higher education" origins.
Here, CEO Joel Dehlin updates us on Kuali today and how it has thrived as a software company that succeeds in the tech marketplace while maintaining the community values envisioned in higher education years ago.
Mary Grush: Ten years ago you told me, "The best thing about Kuali is the community… It's personally very important to me that we continue to engage the community in awesome and productive ways." So how did you do that?
Joel Dehlin: When I was first introduced to the Kuali community, I was awestruck by how smart and how nice the people in it were. But the software higher ed had been subjected to had been bad for a long time. So it seemed like a worthwhile endeavor to help bring amazing software to higher ed.
Taking the software to the next level required additional resources, new processes, and maybe above all, leadership.
So, Kuali.co stepped into the leadership role for the community, bringing on additional engineers and adding product managers, designers, customer success people, sales, marketing, and administrators to the mix. We've modernized tech stacks and methodologies and grown the Kuali footprint significantly.
It's been super-hard work for sure. But merging new leadership together with the community has been all we hoped it would be. Very challenging, but incredible because we're working with great people who care deeply about higher education, people who are smart and kind and articulate as well as demanding.
Merging new leadership together with the community has been all we hoped it would be.
The bottom line is, in the past 10 years — I can't believe the company's been around for 10 years — we've created some really great software.
Grush: Back in the early days, we heard mostly about Kuali Financials. What are the main solution areas today? I've heard quite a lot about Research Administration.
Dehlin: Research administration is as important as it's ever been, and our new Research Administration products are phenomenal and really engaging the market. The interest has exploded.
There's so much excitement about research administration across all quarters, not just in the U.S., but internationally. Our new Research Administration products leapfrog forward to a next generation of research administration that people have been wanting for a long time.
Our new Research Administration products leapfrog forward to a next generation of research administration that people have been wanting for a long time.
All of our Research Administration solutions — Sponsored Programs, post-award, IRB, IACUC, COI/COC — look and feel the same, and they all integrate seamlessly, because they're built on the exact same code base. Also, we're using AI in really interesting ways. And our software methodology allows us to create new capabilities quickly and safely.
But Kuali offers solutions beyond research administration.
We have worked with the community to develop solutions for registrars/provosts, CFO/controllers, IT, and most other departments as well. In addition, any department in an institution can build its own "apps" using our no-code forms and workflow tool, Kuali Build.
Grush: What are some of the shifts and trends now, things that you want to address as a company? What are some of the external forces out there in the environment that your company is responding to?