René Peinl

René Peinl grew up near Regensburg, Bavaria and achieved a diploma (German equivalent to a Master’s degree) in Business Information Systems at Regensburg University. His focus was software engineering and information management. After completing his studies he went to Munich to work for Compaq Computer GmbH as a technical consultant within the EMEA eProcurement Competence Center. During this time he was involved in building electronic marketplaces and connecting suppliers to them in London, Madrid, Prague and Tel Aviv among others. While HP was overtaking Compaq in 2002 he went back to university in order to acquire a PhD. He worked for Ronald Maier at the Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg in the areas of information and knowledge management. In his PhD thesis, he analyzed the details of knowledge transfer from a social science perspective with the help of multi agent-based simulation and concentrated on medium-sized software development companies as an application area. He also co-authored the book “Enterprise Knowledge Infrastructures” which appeared 2009 in its second edition at Springer.

The next station took him to REHAU AG, a globally working systems and service provider for polymer-based solutions in construction, automotive and industry. He was working there as an information systems architect and helped them switching their infrastructure from Lotus Notes and numerous self-developed systems to an enterprise knowledge infrastructure based on Microsoft SharePoint, Project Server and Exchange. During that time he led several infrastructure projects ranging from technical topics like introducing a public key infrastructure in order to foster email encryption and cleansing of Active Directory data in order to use them as a base for SharePoints user profile pages up to business topics like supporting the window division’s knowledge exchange and introducing a quantitative and qualitative  measuring system for opportunity and project management. He also supported the global SharePoint roll-out at REHAU AG by travelling to the regional headquarters, convincing upper management of the benefits of such a system and training local IT staff to be able to support the business departments in creating local SharePoint solutions.

In 2009, he decided to work as a senior consultant for systems integration and knowledge management at IPI GmbH, a small consultancy company with about 35 employees at that time, who specialized in Microsoft SharePoint. For them, he counseled global companies like Martin Bauer, Price Waterhouse Coopers and Munich Re regarding SharePoint introduction and especially supporting knowledge management initiatives. He is still doing consulting projects in the knowledge management area, e.g. lately for GFK, the German  association for research in consumption, although he received a call as full professor to the university of applied sciences in Hof in 2010. His teaching area is “architecture of Web applications” and besides technical topics he is still teaching knowledge management, not only in Hof, but also at the university of applied sciences in Regensburg. He is further more leading the research team “systems integration” at the institute for information systems at Hof University. In this role, he has specialized in open source collaboration software, service-oriented architectures and cloud computing.

René Peinl was loosely involved in the MATURE project from the first moments since the idea dates back to his time working for Ronald Maier, one of the two project initiators. He formally joined the project team as an associate member in 2009 and concentrates on the early phases of knowledge maturing with innovation management, discussion in communities and using Web 2.0 tools to foster the riping of ideas. He further more seeks to support innovation management by integrating knowledge discovery in databases and information retrieval in unstructured document collection with the help of semantic web technologies.