Gartner’s Mark McDonald said in a recent interview that the coming year will be a rocky one for CIOs, with a lot of pressure to demonstrate that technology projects are delivering lots and lots of ROI.  If ROI is non-existent or too low, the technology is out — along with the CIO that approved it.

However, Web 2.0 technologies and methlodologies will remain above this carnage — because they often cost little to implement, and because they foster new means of collaboration at a time when it’s greatly needed.

McDonald told Wisconsin Technology Network that social computing tools “are on a different plain,” because such tools are not prohibitively expensive to adopt.” In fact, Web 2.0 typically hasn’t required capital investments as many other tools have been: “Investments in BI and CRM and ERP were viewed as investments, and fairly significant capital expenditures. Companies are doing web 2.0 things almost as a straight operating expense.”

The collaboration made possible through Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 tools and techniques may help keep companies growing through a soft economy, McDonald pointed out:

“Every company, regardless of who they are, is probably going to be looking at using Web 2.0 to improve internal collaboration. But I think there is a significant difference between companies that are effective and have a history of being effective, which is achieving their goals. Those companies that have that history of being able to achieve their goals are definitely telling us that they are continuing to invest in attracting and retaining customers.”

FastForward colleague Rob Paterson recently pointed to the ROI that Twitter can potentially deliver to organizations seeking to boost innovation and colaboration. “Doing more with less will be a goal of us all in 2009,” Rob says. “Twitter is going to help a lot of people to do more for less.” Rob discusses the multiplier effect of Twitter networks, enabling a wide-reaching network for vety little investment.

A couple of months back, Harvard’s Andrew McAfee also provided a very interesting illustration of how Enterprise 2.0 approaches could help the sputtering auto industry.