The UDM as a counterweight to ERA SaaS lock-in

[nate-layman]

Context

The commercial ERA market (Huron Click, InfoEd / Cayuse Research Suite, Kuali Research, Streamlyne, Workday Grants, PeopleSoft Grants) is a SaaS oligopoly with three structural properties an institution should be wary of:

1. Opaque data shape. Vendor schemas are heavy with numeric lookup IDs (see Survey ERA systems and their data-shape quirks for UDM mapping #50). Even with a database export, the data is meaningless without the vendor's reference tables. Institutions pay to put data in, then pay again to get a readable copy out.
2. No portability. There is no canonical "ERA export format." Migrating off a vendor means rewriting every report, every dashboard, every adjacent integration. Switching costs are deliberately high.
3. Pricing power follows lock-in. Once data, integrations, and staff training are sunk into a vendor, renewal negotiation is a one-sided conversation.

The UDM is, among other things, a structural answer to this. By publishing a vendor-neutral schema with explicit synonyms, descriptions, PII flags, and reference views, an institution gains:

• A target shape that's portable across vendors
• A documentation surface that doesn't depend on the vendor's docs
• A queryable layer where the institution owns the meaning, not the vendor
• A foundation for AI tooling that doesn't require the vendor's permission

What this issue is asking for

Not a new schema feature. A positioning document and a coordinated set of vignettes that make the SaaS-resistance case explicit, both for institutions evaluating adoption and for project communications. Specifically:

• A short vignette titled something like "Why a vendor-neutral schema matters" sitting alongside ontology.md and allowedvalues.md.
• A worked example of mapping one vendor (probably InfoEd, since it's the worst offender on opacity) into the UDM, showing the value of the descriptions + synonyms layer.
• A FAQ section addressing the questions a procurement office will ask: "If we adopt the UDM, are we locked out of Cayuse?" "Can we run our existing Huron implementation and the UDM in parallel?" "What does this do to our vendor relationship?"
• A statement on the project README that frames vendor neutrality as a first-class goal, not just an implementation detail.

Why this needs to be its own piece of work

• The schema-design issues (Award lifetime, proposal UIDs, and the project/account boundary #43, Deadline as a first-class concept across the UDM #44, Sponsor type needs a richer taxonomy than the current Organization_Type value #46–Disambiguate the three sponsor relationships: who pays, where the money originated, and what kind of sponsor it is #48, Model 'restrictions' as a first-class concept (CUI, export control, publication holds) #51) are about getting the model right.
• The ERA survey (Survey ERA systems and their data-shape quirks for UDM mapping #50) is about understanding the source shapes.
• This issue is about why the model exists in the first place and how to talk about it to institutions whose default assumption is "we'll just buy the next ERA."

Without an explicit articulation of the SaaS-counterweight argument, the project reads as "another open-source schema" rather than as a strategic alternative to vendor lock-in.

Open questions

• Is this framing aligned with the funded scope of the AI4RA grant, or does it overreach? (The proposal language about "democratization" suggests the framing fits.)
• Do we want a public-facing positioning page on the GitHub Pages site, or keep this as repo documentation?
• How careful do we need to be about naming specific vendors in public materials? (Probably matter-of-fact descriptions of their data shapes is fine; avoid polemic.)
• Is there a parallel piece of work on the lakehouse side that should ship at the same time so the message is "schema + working implementation" rather than just schema?

Related issues

• Survey ERA systems and their data-shape quirks for UDM mapping #50 (ERA system survey — the technical companion to this strategic framing)
• Project terminology collides with PeopleSoft's Project; disambiguation needed #45 (Project terminology collision with PeopleSoft — a concrete instance of vendor-driven vocabulary drift)

[nate-layman]

Correction: Kuali doesn't belong in the SaaS-oligopoly bucket

Including Kuali in the original list above misrepresents it. Kuali is open-source software stewarded by a steering committee of member institutions (IU, UNC, and others). The commercial arm (Kuali Co) offers hosting, but the code is open and the governance is community-led.

That puts Kuali on the same side of the argument as the UDM, not on the opposite side. The positioning piece should reflect this:

• Vendor-neutral allies. Kuali Research is an existing example of higher-ed institutions resisting closed-vendor lock-in by collectively maintaining their own stack. The UDM's vendor-neutral schema is a complementary effort at the data layer; Kuali sits at the application layer.
• Proper SaaS lock-in targets. Huron Click, InfoEd / Cayuse Research Suite, Workday Grants, PeopleSoft Grants — these are the closed-source / proprietary-data-model systems the SaaS-resistance framing is really about.
• Implication for the worked example. Mapping InfoEd or Huron into the UDM makes the lock-in case viscerally. Mapping Kuali into the UDM is a different exercise — collaboration with an aligned project, not extraction from a hostile schema.

The positioning vignette should explicitly distinguish "vendor lock-in" from "vendor relationships" — open-source academic-led projects are partners, not problems.