Now that I've left Pfizer, I am glad to congratulate my friend Ben Gardner for an excellent slide show. Ben and colleagues (Paul, Mark, Jason, Simon, Scott, etc.) have made a difference at Pfizer by demonstrating how collaboration could really move Pfizer on the path of unforeseen innovation. They relentlessly applied to themselves the values of collective intelligence: open mind, trusting peer environment, constant juggling of innovativeideas, unleashed passion, hard work and fun.
What I like about this slide presentation is that it presents a panel of technologies that has converged towards a coherent collaborative environment over the past two years. One of the first tools was Pfizerpedia, a geek's wiki whose use has been expanded to project description and reporting, profile management, meeting handling, etc. Another team started with a collective blog (DIGWWW) which gained readership in a lot of circles at Pfizer. RSS aggregation, tagging and social network analysis followed. Each technology brought a new dimension to the benefit of corporate collaboration.
In my view, there are two challenges that remain to overcome:
- bring consistency to the installed toolset to avoid duplication of functionality and foster content interoperation (through a consistent meta data layer)
- work to change people's culture towards recognising those who dedicate time and effort to sharing their knowledge and skills.
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