Dealing with the burden of compliance UK companies face a host of legal, technical and financial regulations – and such rules place a significant regulatory burden on the business. What is the CIO’s role in compliance? Should the IT leader lead the firm’s regulatory initiatives, or take a back seat and provide timely information to the finance and legal teams?

A key role for the CIO, in the thorny area of regulation and compliance, is board education. I suspect many directors are unaware of all the areas in which the buck stops with them, not just in relatively well-understood areas such as health and safety, but many IT-related areas, from data protection to business continuity.

Directors must be able to show that they understand their responsibilities and have put in place the necessary policies, processes and reporting structures.

Beyond IT compliance, the CIO has a crucial role as a facilitator. Demonstrating regulatory compliance often rests on the preservation of key data and audit trails.

It is essential for the relevant executive directors to take responsibility for information protection and preservation policies. In most organisations, it is utterly impractical – and unhelpful – to store in perpetuity every piece of data ever created. The CIO has a key role in promoting sanity in data retention policies.

Professor Jim Norton, senior policy adviser, Institute of Directors

Betfair is regulated by government agencies from the UK, Malta and Tasmania. We work closely with regulators, and their needs influence decisions concerning our applications, infrastructure and processes.

Our goal is to lead our industry in customer protection and social responsibility – and we recently retained the Socially Responsible Operator of the Year award.

My role as chief technology officer is to work with the regulators to frame the regulations and ensure we have a framework that makes sense for both of us. This involves contributing to industry meetings, making suggestions, and sharing ideas.

As well as working with government legislators, we collaborate closely with sporting bodies to provide audit trails of all transactions on our platform. This transparency helps regulators identify fraudulent activity on their sports. We set the agenda in terms of online transaction processing and our culture is one where we believe it is better to set the agenda than merely implement it.

Rorie Devine, chief technology officer, Betfair

The CIO should take a leading role in an organisation’s regulatory compliance initiatives for two reasons. First, as a technology leader, only the CIO fully understands the technical implications that compliance has on systems and infrastructure.

But CIOs also need to be business leaders and drive the compliance process in the long term. They are the crucial link between the requirements, the tools needed to fulfil them and the business context in which everything operates.

As the link between the business and IT worlds, CIOs need to evolve from managing technological solutions to fulfilling the business role of turning the burden of regulatory compliance into a positive business driver.

David Metcalfe, senior vice president research, Forrester Research

The involvement of the CIO in compliance is critical given that businesses are becoming increasingly dependent on IT for process automation support.

Given that every area of the business is touched by IT, and all information relating to business activity and financial reporting currently resides in these databases, how can we be sure that the data contained therein is correct?

That question is increasingly difficult to answer as the threats to data integrity become more varied and complex.

The list of events that have the potential to damage the accuracy of reporting includes intentional data corruption viruses, unplanned or incorrectly performed application changes and bugs in third-party software.

Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer, Savvis

Using technology to develop skills Organisations use a range of learning technologies to help boost skills, such as online learning, web conferencing, knowledge management and social computing. How should CIOs use tools and techniques to make the most of their employees’ abilities?

Having in the team, the right skills, at the right level, in the right place and at the right time, has been a long-standing challenge for all CIOs. This is evermore so with rapidly developing technologies, meaning that skills have to be updated more and more quickly.

We have an ever-expanding number of channels through which we can encourage and enable learning and development. One of the most important things for me is to be able to identify how different people learn through different channels.

Getting the balance should be the focus for all training plans, otherwise you could find that you have a lot of wasted investment – both in money and in time.

Denise Plumpton, director of information, The Highways Agency

To make the most of staff potential, CIOs need to ensure individual and team training needs can be met regardless of location or hours of work.

In terms of formal training, technology supports flexible, tailored and just-in-time learning that can be accessed quickly, widely and cost-effectively by staff.

The electronic delivery of formal training has been shown to make a significant contribution to staff productivity. One company found that two-thirds of its employees saved about five hours per month through online access to technical learning and resources. Technology also supports informal learning through tools such as blogs, internal wikis and podcasts.

Karen Price, chief executive, eSkills UK

Skill is the ability to carry out a particular activity. It is acquired more through experience than reading. Many organisations wasted money a few years ago when installing web-based, elearning systems.

The scattergun approach to basic information courseware often yielded mediocre returns. Real skill development is hard to do through IT systems because it needs compelling simulation of experiences.

For example, flight simulators develop deep, valuable skills in both trainee and qualified airline pilots. We might hope for computer games technology to offer new opportunities here.

Mark Raskino, vice president and research Fellow, Gartner

CIOs need to tailor the approach based on the subject and the individual. Some topics are suitable for an elearning approach, some individuals benefit from a face-to-face workshop and others work best in a environment where a combination of both approaches are used.

Similar principles apply to a group learning environment where technologies such as web conferencing increasingly support remote participatory activities.

It is particularly valuable to make the training time-relevant so that it can be applied in the same period ideally to support a work-oriented opportunity

Sharm Manwani, Henley Management College