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A posting on the KU website about my brother-in-law, Dilawar:

Dilawar Grewal, associate vice provost for Information Services
Years at current job: About a year as the Director of Research IT Services and less than a year as the Associate Vice Provost for Information Services.

Job Duties: As the associate vice provost for IS, I head the IT division of Information Services. The Libraries are the other division of Information Services under the unified leadership of the Vice Provost for Information Services.

In the capacity of the director of Research IT Services, I am focused on enhancing IT capabilities and capacities at KU specifically in support of its research mission

What is one thing that would surprise people about your work? As is common knowledge, KU IT resources are distributed and so is control over the same resources. While it is not necessary to centralize everything, it is essential that development and planning for resources be unified at an institutional level. In a distributed environment, our collective abilities become limited by the lowest common denominators. Further, to the rest of the world, especially the research funding world, KU is one entity. Those funding agencies do not differentiate between the abilities of KU as a whole and those of individual components of the university.

Building an infrastructure for the common good is what I was hired for, is what I believe in and that is what I spend most of my time on. Infrastructure to me means more than computers and networks. It means the machines and the networks, as well as the expertise, ideas and energy people contribute, the goodwill essential for effective communications, the ways and means to achieve success for many, and the reputation of KU.

How has evolving technology improved IT’s abilities to serve the university in your time at KU? Evolving technologies provide people with operational duties better mouse traps for the problems they are trying to address. It is always a fluid situation when it comes to information technology. The biggest difference in how IT is better able to serve the university comes not just from the better mouse traps that become available, rather from the desire of the IT leadership and the employees that comprise IT to make a genuine difference in the work of the university. We are truly putting our thinking, expertise, efforts, resources and even emotions, into reaping benefits for KU. This translates into better processes and business practices, better communications and most importantly, looking at things holistically. Enabling success elsewhere at KU is also a success for IT.

Initiative One is under way to improve KU’s information infrastructure. How will this university wide effort improve KU’s teaching and research mission? There are essentially two major components driving Initiative One. a). Garnering efficiencies in terms of harnessing the power of the collective. This means that KU, and KU constituent entities, save money when we negotiate special hardware, software and even service rates in bulk as compared to piecemeal retail purchases. Examples of this would include the Dell volume purchasing licensing and Microsoft agreement for campus. The “weight” behind these agreements helps faculty, students and researchers buy machines and software at a fraction of the cost, thus enabling expanded use of base technologies in teaching, learning and research. b). Coordinating planning and enhancing the infrastructure: as part of Initiative One we are engaging the users and the community. You may have noticed, this summer under the direction of the VP for Information Services, IT launched a series of advisory groups to craft paths forward for all of KU in the areas of desktop acquisition and imaging, desktop support, enterprise document imaging, enterprise document management, storage, network architecture and high performance computing.

Our intention is to open up communications, better understand user needs, more efficiently invest limited resources, and in the end, make the user experience better than before. These advisory groups include more than 100 participants from many different departments and academic/research units at KU, and are tasked with looking at the fundamental issues, needs and requirements related to having robust infrastructures in all those areas. Examples here would include an upgrade to the network backbone, Hawkdrive as a common document storage facility, better delivery of end-user support, be it for desktop support or high performance computing support. These successes can only be achieved and sustained if many different parts start contributing towards a common planning paradigm.

Thus far, this engagement has very quietly and subtly enabled IT to build planning bridges that take into account not only the IT reality, but also the reality of the people it serves—faculty, staff and students— the reality of other units at KU, and the reality of where KU wants to be as a major research institution. For me, personally, this is the most powerful of all efforts and will help IT better serve faculty, researchers, students, and KU the most.