Over the past year, I’ve been exploring the potential for Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0-oriented services to not only pull both enterprises and individuals through the rough-and-tumble economy, but also to change the way we approach work and business.

Dion Hinchcliffe has just published an overview of some compelling options Enterprise and Web 2.0 approaches offer organizations in the current economic climate and upcoming recovery; far smarter than the rip-and-replace approach to workforce and knowledge management we’ve known in the past.

Move to lower-cost online/SaaS versions of enterprise applications; move IT infrastructure to the cloud. Dion cites statistics that show moving to SaaS versions of applications can save organizations up to 40% in their IT budgets. “Recent reports say that moving to a SaaS version of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system will save the average firm 25% to 40%, a number that likely translates well to other types of business applications given the core nature of CRM to most enterprises.” Dion cautions, however, that a move to SaaS for strategic applications is not a trivial undertaking, and it’s best to start with more peripheral applications. However, cloud computing provides much greater agility as business shifts — reducing underused capacity and investments in one part of the business, and straining resources in another part.

Use Enterprise 2.0 to capture the knowledge and know-how of employees. A couple of months back, Harvard’s Andrew McAfee speculated that the auto industry could benefit immensely by tapping into the collective knowledge of its workforce.

Dion is of the same mind, warning that companies that engage in layoffs risk losing “tens of thousands of years of built up expertise and capability, largely untapped; the knowledge residing in inaccessible places such as e-mail accounts, file servers, meeting notes, and most devastating of all, in the minds of the departing workers.” He urges organizations to take a different tact, developing networks that can learn and accumulate knowledge. “Enabling open, persistent, freeform collaboration amongst far-flung workers allows vast amounts of institutional knowledge to pour out into visible places on the network where that information can then be studied, reused, and learned by others including (perhaps especially) new workers down the road…. Making your intranet a vibrant, ever growing, worker-powered, two-way social media landscape is one of the surest investments you can make in your organization.”

Embrace new low-cost models for production — such as crowdsourcing. “Crowdsourcing — in which organizations tap into the knowdledge, innovation, and vitality of social networks — represents and new frontier for management. The advantages, Dion points out, include “using the vast audience of people on the network as a primary source of innovation, research, and product development as well as customer support, sales, and marketing.” However, he cautions that crowdsourcing requires a certain set of skills “that is very different from traditional corporate hierarchical command-and-control.” Managers need to understand how to leverage social networks.

Lower customer service costs by pro-active use of online customer communities. Related to crowdsourcing, greater efficiencies and knowledge can be gained from creating or tapping into the collective wisdom of online customer communities. However, Dion points out, few companies have mastered this capability yet. There’s an urgent need for this kind of resource: “With the rank and file of the customer service and account representative ranks of organizations shrinking rapidly in many cases, now is time to provide your customers an entirely new and largely superior channel for communication, collaboration, and working together and amongst themselves.”

Open your supply chain to partners on the Web. This could be one of the biggest growth areas over the coming year, Dion says. “If you want double-digit growth during the downturn in whatever otherwise staid industry you are in, there are few more powerful 2.0 techniques for doing it than turning your business into a strategic open platform on the network.”