Yet another aspect of compliance is about to loom large on the chief information officer (CIO) agenda.

Recent changes to Federal rules of civil procedure governing lawsuits in the US will have big implications for UK CIOs who also operate Stateside.

The procedure raises questions about how an organisation handles electronic evidence and ­ alongside other legislation ­ requires companies to be able to locate relevant information wherever it is stored.

Software that is used to automate the so-called e-discovery process is starting to arrive on the market.

Eventually CIOs will be able to look to a single system capable of automating the whole spectrum of consolidated archiving, analytics and real-time policy management.

E-discovery software could best be described as being a linguistics engine with specialist tools that analyse words and the construction of phrases and sentences in stored, unstructured text files.

Such applications are fronted by a deliberately simple user interface, so that any business user could carry out searches in natural language. E-discovery software is ultimately capable of searching and discovering information held, not only in documents and applications, but in voice and video records as well.

Regulatory and judicial bodies recognise the area is enormously complex. The unique characteristics of electronic data, compared with paper records, present unprecedented challenges for the CIO.

But start to examine electronic information and records management from the three different perspectives of legal, records management and IT, and it quickly becomes clear that software tools are only part of the issue.

Obligations of the litigation process ­ such as the duty to preserve information that is, or may become, discoverable ­ differ greatly from the operational needs of data storage, where data deletion and destruction is a real and acceptable stage in the information lifecycle.

The Sedona Guidelines, Best Practice and Commentary for Managing Information and Records in the Electronic Age, is a good starting point for anyone wanting to familiarise themselves with the extent of the problem.

CIOs will require a practical, flexible and scalable approach to address the differences in an organisation’s business needs, its operations, the IT infrastructure and emerging regulatory and legal responsibilities.

For some, such an approach could favour a centralised function for compliance, while others may opt to delegate significant responsibilities to individual employees, before turning on automation to identify and maintain records.

But for now it is clear that no single standard or model will fully meet an organisation’s information and records management policies and procedures.

Nick Kirkland is managing director of CIO Connect, a leading forum for chief information officers and chief executives