Christopher Bouton, team leader specializing in computational biology at Pfizer's Research Technology Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photograph by Leah Fasten

Chris Bouton shared with ON some of the most valuable lessons learned from his experience with Pfizerpedia.

1. The value of finding and being found

"The key feature of the wiki is the ability to find things that are relevant to your own work. That's what keeps people coming back to Pfizerpedia and drives them to spend their time entering information about their own projects. It lets them find and be found."

2. A solution that costs next to nothing

"There was pretty much zero cost for creating Pfizerpedia. The wiki software was free. The server was a spare. All the content is generated by the community and zero marketing was required: Growth has been completely viral."

3. Balancing access and security

"You always have to balance knowledge sharing with the need to maintain protection for sensitive content. Pfizerpedia is inside the firewall, which provides a first level of protection. And everyone's project data is stored in secure repositories and Web portals, which is a second level. So while project descriptions can be searched and viewed on the wiki, to access the actual content, you have to contact that team and arrange for the right permissions."

4. Making the cultural leap

"One of the cultural issues we faced around user uptake was people's discomfort with the idea of having others edit their work. But once we showed them the history trail and they understood they had the option to override changes and revert back to the previous version, that seemed to satisfy their concerns."

5. The importance of management support

"Support from the organization's leadership is crucial to developing a platform like this. Pfizer is very good about encouraging grassroots efforts to enable collaboration and knowledge sharing. A large number of these types of technologies are now coming online within the organization."