About the Author

Vivek Narendra, MS, MBA, has spent two decades on the seam between strategy and implementation, the place where good intentions meet the database that actually has to answer the question.

As Senior Director of DataOps and CRM Strategy at the Oregon State University Foundation, he owns the foundation that fundraising rests on: enterprise data strategy, governance, data quality, and the CRM that runs the shop. He was first responsible for the Foundation’s multi-year migration to a Dynamics-based CRM, which he carried through a clean go-live in January 2018. The work was recognized with a CASE Circle of Excellence Grand Gold in Advancement Services and a CASE VIII Rising Star Award.

What came next mattered as much as the conversion itself. Vivek turned the experience outward, sharing the lessons learned and the technical strategy with peer institutions so they could plan their own CRM conversions without paying the same tuition he had. That instinct, doing the hard work and then giving the map away, is the thread that runs through everything he does.

Today his work centers on agentic AI and process automation in advancement. He builds AI agents, ships them, and keeps them running against production data, which is the real discipline of getting agents to do reliable work in a live shop. His conviction is simple. Agents are only as trustworthy as the data underneath them, so the foundation comes first and the agent comes second.

Before advancement, Vivek was a software architect building scientific software for geophysical and geological data, and a graduate researcher on OSU’s NSF-funded Science Access Project, where he helped develop WinTriangle, an open-source word processor that let blind and sighted scientists read and write mathematics together. He founded Dawsonsoft in 2009 and serves as Board President of the Vina Moses Center. He holds an MS in Computer Science and an MBA from Oregon State University.