Yesterday, I attended a luncheon at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association event that is happening this week.

Larry Kudlow, the speaker, expressed lots of concerns about our future. I was at a table with CIOs from various financial institutions and we had been talking before Larry spoke about different concerns regarding the future regulation in the financial markets.

There are some interesting compliance (let's call them "Super Blue Sheets") requirements that are being pushed through in Washington, D.C., that can bring a new level of documentation and IT requirements to the market.

Additionally, the Securities Exchange Commission seems to have swapped out the old with the new, and is looking at reviewing past and current blue sheets. The SEC (News - Alert) in one case was asking for backup tapes from ten years ago (the legal compliance requirements are for seven).

This was on the top of their minds, but we managed to talk about their anecdotal experiences as well.

First of all, everyone loved their BlackBerrys -- they had them integrated into the network and they were compliant with corporate policy. If you want a different type of phone, you are on your own and it's outside the scope of corporate policy. For one of the CIOs, ATT had flown out an Apple (News - Alert) representative to talk about strategy and requirements for Enterprise customers. He came away from the discussion feeling that Apple was going to stay on the consumer side and expected that he was going to have to accept the adoption regardless of its impact on IT.

Your consumer side will force you to accept Apple. Two of the CIOs sitting there had iPhones which they had "because of their family." Apple's strategy seems to be working.

It was generally agreed that ten years old was the age when cellphones were being issued to kids and daughters were the ones that wanted them first. One of the CIO's was using Family Tracker to watch his kids and their travels which he said he watched regularly to make sure his teenagers were where they said they were. He also had a two texts then call rule, which meant that if his kids could not express their requests in text to the point where a parental unit understood after the second text they were to call. Talking on the phone was never the kid's preference.

Like the Family the young employees are adopting more rich media and expecting to use it while at work.

This is causing other compliance issues with social networks. Almost every company had restrictions on employees indicating their employment on Facebook (News - Alert). And almost every company had concerns about security, compliance, and HR with what was being displayed on Facebook. The use of Facebook as a marketing face had been discussed, but was not being implemented by any of the CIO's I spoke with.

Compliance on the Internet side was not quite there yet. The official corporate rules were mixed on maintaining records for chat, text, wireless and video. Currently Audio conferencing was matching their needs nicely and they had no complaint about that or any strong sense that Video Conferencing was needed.


However, one of the companies shared that Skype (News - Alert) Video was being used by the younger employees.

When we first started doing 4GWE we saw that like evolution, natural selection was going to be involved in corporate roll outs. Some would survive and some would perish.

It's clear that some big waves of change are pushing requirements in different directions. The financial sector is a place where they pay for keeping a record to be compliant. It adds cost to do it, so it makes them a hard market to be the initial mover, but if they can adopt the technology, you can bet it's cost effective for almost every market.