James Dellow on Wikipatterns: “steps naturally from explaining the value and use cases of wikis into the adoption process”
James Dellow reviews the Wikipatterns book:
The book is structured well and steps naturally from explaining the value and use cases of wikis into the adoption process. In terms of adoption, Mader offers 11 steps to a successful wiki pilot… that’s right, these are tips just to get the pilot right! In fact, its refreshing to find someone suggesting that adopting a wiki in an organisation can take a lot more effort than simply plugging a wiki into your corporate LAN.
He suggests that the patterns I’ve applied to wiki adoption can go beyond wikis themselves, and help catalyze adoption of other collaborative technologies:
my recommendation is that Wiki Patterns is worth a look regardless of the collaborative technologies you are using… there are a set of “patterns” in well written format here that can be applied to a variety of collaborative technologies.
And gives an example of the time- and frustration-saving benefit of using the wiki approach instead of email:
In one instance the process of submitting a large package of information to head office that was too large to email was reduced from hours of effort and days of elapsed time to less than an hour.
Do you have your copy of Wikipatterns? If so, what have you found most useful from the book? Let me know in the comments!
If you don’t have your copy yet, there’s no better time than now to order! And if you need a helping hand with wiki adoption, please get in touch!
Andrea says:
May 12th, 2008
I have recently started reading Wikipatterns and I am really enjoying it. The book is incredibly informative and very easy to read. I haven’t finished it yet but the thing I like the most so far are the case studies. They are especially useful at the moment because I am slowly trying to convince my company to consider a wiki, with the case studies I can say “here read this, see how and why they did it”