Frank Leistner    Premium Member

My life started out in a city in northern Germany named Salzgitter. My main hobbies were basketball, swimming, diving and windsurfing. In 1978 I spend a year as an exchange student in Oregon, US. A year filled with fun, sport, travel but also learning and I ended up with a High-School-Diploma.
Back in Germany I finished German School and went on to study Computer Science in Braunschweig, Germany. To get a balanced view, I choose Medicine as a minor. Five years after my first return, I got a Fullbright stipend for SUNY (State University of New York) in Albany, NY. I stayed a year and finished it with a Master of Science in Computer Science after a little extra work back in Braunschweig. Just to keep all the options open, I added the German Diploma (Dipl. Inf) on top.

During my college years, I developed my main current hobby - juggling and at the moment I am polishing my 5-ball pattern...

After I finished University, I joined Nixdorf Computer, one of the major computer companies in Germany at the time. To keep with the rythm I took on a position with Nixdorf in the US (again five years after my return to Germany). By that time, I had founded a family and with my wife and my two girls we took on the adventure Sillicon Valley. Four years of working in a development and management function at Nixdorf and later Siemens-Nixdorf helped me build a lot of experience in areas like operating systems and liason management.

Coming back I moved to Business Analytics company SAS Institute in Heidelberg and after a couple of years in development, sales support, consulting etc. I ended up finding my real passion: Knowledge Management (KM).

Over the last 12 years I have constantly worked on building a holistic view of KM, that also includes the softer elements (for example - how do you actually get people consistently to share their knowledge) and does not stop at technology. But even after those years, there is still a lot of great challenges ahead. New technologies make some things a lot easier, but they also demand the development of processes that make them work in a business environment.

My latest thinking goes into two diverse directions:
1. How can Business Analytics and Knowledge Management benefit from each other.
2. The ongoing challenge of human issues within the Management of Knowledge - I think we are ready for some specialization - i.e. special KM roles. If Knowledge is the most important thing, why do organizations not dedicate more effort to the management of it's flow, but leave it only to the individual or their IT managers?

Since June 2007 I have global KM responsibility with my primary location in Zürich, Switzerland.

Now in 2009, I am working on a book named "Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow", that will be out early 2010.