Problem:
The Kuali Foundation is a very interesting cooperative venture developing financial information systems in the academic sector. As they describe themselves,
The Kuali Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for sustaining and evolving a comprehensive suite of administrative software that meets the needs of all Carnegie Class institutions. Its members are colleges, universities, commercial firms and interested organizations that share a common vision of open, modular, and distributed systems for their software requirements. The goal of Kuali is to bring the proven functionality of legacy applications to the ease and universality of online services.
Basically, Kuali is a suite of open source software based financial management applications, applied to the particular needs of colleges and universities. The software is freely available, but support requires participation in the community. Not an unreasonable request, and it does allow for the process of learning how to implement a system and for working out the various sociotechnical adjustments that could be to be made in transitioning to a Kuali based system in any university.
Kathleen T. McNeely and Mary S. Wheeler. A Flexible Financial System. NACUBO
University of Arizona's implementation:
Overview of the system.
Implementation.
Re-evaluation.
You will probably also want to review the Wikipedia article on Organizational Dimensions of Information described in the introduction to this module.
The background information has further material on flows of financial data and associated decision making. In addition, you may wish to seek out further information through your own research. When you have reviewed the advice and the plans, please prepare a short response discussing:
Horizontal Flow, Inward-Outward Flow, Vertical Information flow, and Downward Information Flow of financial data in the Kuali system