For the past 2 years or so there has been much debate in the office about the state of the economy. My colleague Denis Hancock had a great post on the state of the housing market that highlighted this very interesting mash-up of historical US housing prices and Atari RollerCoaster Tycoon(R) 3. Now that we are clearly in the midst of an economic slump, there are many debates about what got us here and how it can be remedied.

During recessions company’s start to hunker down, prepare to weather the storm. We have seen this in our clients in terms of budget cuts, hiring freeze’s and even more aggressive staffing cutbacks. Regardless of the how you spin it, downsizing, streamlining or put more transparently ‘layoffs’, the point is that organization are looking to cut costs and do more (or at least the same) with less.

Personally this seems to be a perfect opportunity for Web 2.0 tools and technologies to further penetrate the enterprise. Collaborative tools are a lightweight, low cost technology designed to drive faster communication, more efficient collaboration and greater transparency in organizations. If you are an organization trying to do more with less this would seem to be the ideal solution.

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