There's a great article in the December issue of the NACUBO Business Officer magazine about the impact an enterprise workflow system can have on student (customer) service.

The story is centered on two before and after scenarios at the University of Connecticut (UCONN) where enterprise workflow software transformed a troublesome process on campus. In the first they used Lotus Domino to transform a graduate assistance payroll process from a two week nightmare, to a straightforward 24 hour process. In the second scenario UCONN transformed the completion of the dependent tuition waiver for children of university employees using Kuali Enterprise Workflow (KEW) software. The following quote from the article sums up the results nicely:

Converting our dependent tuition waiver via KEW made our previous paper process seem almost embarrassing.

One really neat thing about this story is that UCONN used open source software developed by the Kuali community to dramatically improve service to their users. Kuali is a community of institutions and commercial organizations working together using open source methods to develop and license enterprise software for education. Because the software is available under an open source license, UCONN was able to download it and immediately benefit from it without restriction.

An important effect of the open source model is that people often find and use software in ways not originally contemplated by the creators. This is largely because the software and source code are available to anyone without licensing restrictions. The KEW software that UCONN is using was originally a part of the Kuali Financial System (KFS). Several of the founders of the Kuali project working on the Financial System saw a lot of value in the embedded workflow engine independent of the financial system. As a result, the engine was decoupled so that it could be used independently. This is a real benefit over the proprietary model where a discovery like this wouldn't necessarily occur. And if the discovery did occur, licensing restrictions and the complexity of monetizing the decoupled component might prevent it from being released.

The software industry in education is undergoing a transformation. Increasingly the best software is being developed as a multi-organization community using open source methods and open source licensing. While much of the current generation of proprietary software will be replaced by new open source alternatives, there's a vital role for commercial organizations to play in the emergent software ecosystem. rSmart (my company), for example, is one of the founders of the Kuali project and enables widespread adoption and use by providing the services and support that many institutions need. I'm proud to say that we're in good company among exemplars like IBM and Sun.

Early adopters like UCONN are playing a vital role in projects like Kuali by demonstrating successful outcomes like the ones in the NACUBO article. I'm grateful they took the time to share the information and educate others.