The old story about the shoemaker, of course, is that he was so busy making shoes for his customers that his kids went without. Since September’s financial crisis, our focus at Yankee Group has been squarely on helping our clients adapt their connectivity plans to the new realities of a global recession. We’ve been digging through our survey data, updating forecasts and consulting intensively with client planning teams to adapt to the changed environment.

Today we’re taking a moment to adjust our own affairs in response to market conditions. Given a reduced outlook for our growth this year, we have released a small number of Yankee Group staff. This includes two analysts, Dan Taylor and Jon Edwards. We thank all of these talented people for their dedicated contributions to our vision and to our clients.

Our 100% focus on the transformations of the connectivity revolution we call Anywhere, our commitment to our 2009 Research Agenda, our choice of research categories, our expanded global data collection, and our new continuous ‘river’ consumer and enterprise connectivity survey work are all unchanged. You can view the latest quarterly update to our agenda for details here.

If you have questions, please get in touch with Mike Conley or Ajay Sule if you’re a YG client, or Shirley Macbeth if you’re in the media.

Back to making shoes for our clients: 2009 will be a watershed year for connectivity. In many ways, the economic picture is actually accelerating the world’s transformation to an Anywhere Economy, as many of those changes are lower in cost and productivity enhancing. Look for a posting here next week from Justin Neville-Rolfe highlighting some unexpected nuggets of Anywhere change exposed in our global market adoption monitors, forecasts, and surveys. Later this month, we’ll share some news around the release of a series of new publications providing strong insight on answers to our six framing Anywhere research questions.