Primary Data: Interviews

The primary data was based on 16 semi-structured in-depth interviews that were conducted via the Internet using Skype and Google Hangouts applications. Each interview lasted for 30 to 60 minutes, and was recorded with permission. The interviewees are categorised into administrators and technicians who are, at the time of data collection, employees in Kuali Foundation, Kuali Commercial Affiliates, KualiCo, or the contributing universities. The administrator category includes members responsible for the functional side of Kuali projects, such as executive directors, strategic

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advisors, and business analysts. The technicians represent those who are responsible for the technical side of the projects, such as programmers, and IT consultants. Table 9 presents descriptive information about the interviewees. Some of the interviewees have multiple roles in the community; however table 9 displays their job title as shown in Kuali Information System.

Interviewee

(pseudonym) Organisation Team Job title

Admin1 Kuali Foundation Kuali Foundation

Executive Director Admin2 Kuali Foundation Kuali

Foundation Strategic Advisor

Admin3 University (USA) KC Director, Research and Information Systems

Admin4 University (USA) KFS Senior Consultant to the CIO Admin5 University (USA) KFS Financial Management Services Admin6 University

(Canada)

KS CIO UT (KS)

Admin7 University (USA) KC Senior Director, Research Partnership Services

BA1 KualiCo KFS Business Analyst

BA2 University (USA) KFS Business Analyst

PM1 KualiCo KFS Product Manager (previous KFS functional member in a university)

Tech1 KualiCo KFS IT Consultant

Tech2 KualiCo KFS Analyst

Tech3 University (USA) KFS Applications Programmer Tech4 University (South

Africa) KS Senior Consultant (KS)

Tech5 KualiCo KC Research Compliance Product Owner Tech6 University

(Canada)

KS Project manager (KS)

Table 9: Details of Interviewees

The interviews were conducted in two rounds that took place between 03/07/2015 to 03/08/2015 and 15/12/2015 to 28/03/2016 respectively.

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The interviewees were identified during the process of analysing Kuali archived documents. The regulation documents illustrate that the Kuali Foundation is the governing body of the community, and accordingly the employees of the Foundation played an essential role in the governance process. The Foundation included (at the time of data collection) 14 employees; 12 of them were Board directors and officers that were elected in a yearly basis, and they were also holding administrative positions in their corresponding universities. The remaining 2 employees, which have been chosen as interview participants, were purely representing the Foundation. They are aware of the governance practices since the inception of Kuali. The first participant is the executive director of Kuali Foundation, who then became the gatekeeper for the second round of interviews. The second participant is the strategic advisor of Kuali Foundation, who is also one of the community founders. The rest of the participants of the first round were identified from the email discussions.

During the first round of interviews, I ensured to focus on the context of the American universities as they form the majority of the community. The initial coding process revealed that the target Kuali projects (i.e. KFS, KC, KS) were designed with the American HE settings in mind. However, there were some unique requirements determined by the federal governments of the states. Therefore, representatives from universities of different states within USA have been selected to understand how Kuali community responded to those specific requirements.

In addition, the analysis of the first round of interviews revealed that the context of country has an influence in the governance practices, and accordingly the second round of interviews included representatives from South Africa (SA) and Canada. Universities from these countries were chosen in particular because they have implemented at least one Kuali project of interest (i.e. KFS, KS, KC) and went through the process of implementation and post-implementation, and thus experienced the emergence and reconfiguration of various governance practices. Besides,

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they have representatives in Kuali Board, and accordingly have influence on the future direction of the projects. In addition, the corresponding universities in SA and Canada have implemented KS project, which has been developed from scratch and had a very slow progress in comparison to the KFS and KC due to the complex user requirements. Accordingly, they have faced different challenges with regards to governance (this will be further explained in chapter 5).

Moreover, the reason for selecting SA is because it has different HE requirements in comparison to the context of USA, which is dominating the design of Kuali projects. An interview was conducted with a senior technical member from SA that was present during all implementation stages of KFS and KS projects and is experienced in both the administrative and technical aspects of the projects. Furthermore, Canada was chosen because it has similar educational settings with USA, but different governmental policies that had influenced the governance of Kuali projects in Canada. Interviews have been conducted with a senior administrative and a senior technical member of KS project in Canada. To sum up, the objective of choosing SA and Canada in particular was to cover different user perspectives and different contexts in order to enrich the research data.

The interviews were semi-structured based on interview guides. I have prepared a different interview guide for each participant. Figure 3 represents a sample interview guide7_{. As recommended by Charmaz}

(2014), the interview guide is a detail of all possible questions that are related to the research questions to assist the researcher in being spontaneous during the actual interview. Therefore, I have prepared a guide for each interviewee. The guides mainly included general questions related to the interviewee’s day-to-day activities, the workflow process, the communication patterns with geographically dispersed team members, and the design and use of the technology and how it has influenced the

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coordination and control of the projects. Besides, each guide included question that were specific to the role of the interviewee in Kuali community. The actual interview included more questions that were inspired by the interviewee’s answers. The interview provided real-time and retrospective data about Kuali. They provided different perspectives on the previously collected secondary data (Gioia et al., 2013). The interviews were transcribed and uploaded to Nvivo.

Figure 3: A Sample Interview Guide