Stress, job insecurity and no ROI: Compliance for CIOs

Compliance might be good for keeping lawyers and regulators happy but it's having the opposite effect on the nation's CIOs, making them more stressed; causing them to question their future as techies and siphoning off valuable budget.

According to research from Dell, who quizzed more than 1,000 IT managers, two-thirds of tech bosses said meeting the demands of new legislation made their jobs more demanding, while one third claimed being an IT manager was a less attractive career as a result of increased compliance.

Legislation including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Freedom of Information Act is also emptying the UK's IT coffers, according to the research, with over 10 per cent of tech's balance sheet now being spent on compliance.

IT managers are pessimistic about the prospects for their costly compliance projects to boot - more than half aren't expecting to see any ROI for their pains.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, vendors are experiencing a mini-boom as a result of mushrooming compliance in tech.

Analyst house IDC predicts that the worldwide information management for compliance market will be worth $20bn by 2009. Security, systems management, content and records management, email archiving and storage are all expected to flourish as a result of the increasing compliance legislation.

Email archiving applications alone cost businesses $180m last year, IDC found - a sharp increase from 2003's figure of $33m.