Simon now works on enterprise 2.0 full time as day job at Pfizer. This was not the case when he started to promote it. He started blog in UK, not as his day job, but Simon felt something useful was happening. So he started a conversation with some colleagues. They called it DIGWWW – discussion group on world wide web. It was designed to be a bit edgy to appeal to the younger demographic. They felt they were challengers and took inspiration from punk rock. It doesn’t seem quite that as edgy an initiative now. It quickly caught on with grass roots effect. However, they were nervous at first. They had to overcome the fear barrier as they allowed anonymous posting to lower this barrier.

At the same time, some R&D people in US started Pfizerpedia. Now the wiki has10,000 articles. It is used for more than an encyclopedia. Among other things, there are many small success stories at Pfizer and the wiki helps surface continuous improvement ideas. It dramatically increased the number of people providing suggestions for improve over the previous channels.

Simon found blogs to be one of the most difficult things to get off the ground. He did not call the channel a blog for this reason. Simon feels that good blogs are hard to do but when they work they are very effective. For example, there is a team leader with 70 people. He reaches his team through a blog to share his vision and get feedback. It works because he is not talking down to people but sharing and wanting feedback.

To build support for enterprise 2.0 they created an internal marketing tool - Meet Jessica (like meet Charlie on the web). It is used to promote and explain enterprise 2.0 through a profile of someone using the tools. Jessica and her team uses blogs. They also use RSS from many sources inside and outside the firm. Jessica encourages her team to use Pziferpedia. They also use social bookmarking, and more tools.

I found that most successful knowledge management engagements that I was involved with developed and implemented an internal marketing plan to support the transformation in behavior. They transformation now with enterprise 2.0 is much greater. The magnitude of the transformation was a common theme at many sessions at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.