Leading off this week’s roundup, from our sister site SearchCIO-Midmarket.com, we have a CIO whose gold medal-worthy green tech innovation is truly energizing London’s Olympic Park. Also, read about how speeding to market with software could kill a trading firm, and read about the CIO’s role in IT transformation.

As chronicled on the SearchCIO-Midmarket.com blog, CIO Symmetry, the CIO of the London summer games scored big, lighting up Olympic Park with green tech innovation. And he didn’t even have to put on a Speedo.

Speed is great for sprinters and the like but can be downright dangerous for makers of stock-trading software. Perhaps Wall Street’s third stock-trading fiasco in five months will drive home this point.

Winning by changing the rules doesn’t sound very sportsmanlike. Unless we’re talking victory over network hackers — then by all means we ought to hear out the argument for changing the rules of writing code.

Think social collaboration is a frivolous pursuit? Perhaps this bar graph can convince you otherwise.

Finally, be sure to check out this week’s CIO Matters column, in which SearchCIO.com’s Editorial Director Scot Petersen looks at the role of the CIO in the midst of IT transformation.

Zynga may want to have a word with friends. Opinion is rife that Facebook doesn’t have the company’s best interests at heart.

We now know one outlet where BlackBerry users won’t be reading more bad news for RIM.

Where there’s money, there are criminals. Hot on the heels of tech innovation that makes your smartphone a virtual wallet comes a tech innovation that virtually steals that wallet.

Who doesn’t like a good chart? We especially like this one which attempts to diagram the main routes to unified information access (UIA) across silos when dealing with big data.

Finally, be sure to check out this week’s CIO Matters, wherein our crusading columnist Wendy Schuchart saves the day with awesomely powerful leadership lessons CIOs can glean from superheroes. Kapow!

“Cyberspace — the interdependent network of information technology components that underpins many of our communications — is a crucial component of the nation’s critical infrastructure,” the draft states. “The nation faces a host of increasingly sophisticated threats against the personal, sensitive, financial and confidential information of organizations and individuals.” It then delivers sobering numbers: In 2009 the Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, website received 336,655 complaints, up 22.3% from 2008. The total dollar loss from all the cases referred in 2009 was $559.7 million, up from $264.6 million in 2008.

According to the draft strategy, cybercriminals exploit weak identity solutions for individuals, websites, email and the infrastructure that connects to the Internet. And by “weak,” the draft means passwords. This should come as no surprise to CIOs grappling with federated identity and single sign-on for managing identities in their hybrid cloud environments. It will be worth watching the evolution of a national identity ecosystem based on industry standards and backed by a partnership of private and public enterprises. In it, identity would be authenticated in a variety of ways and on various devices. Stay tuned to SearchCIO.com next week to learn more.

The potential for national identity cards scares the dickens out of regular folks who fear Big Brother and don’t realize what a big problem cybercrime is. The more than 10 million Americans who are victims of identity theft each year each can spend as much as 130 hours reconstructing their identities (credit rating, bank accounts, reputation, for example) following an identity crime, according to the Federal Trade Commission. But the financial risk for businesses and indeed, the national GDP, is alarming — and is heightened by the fact that we lack enough jurisprudence to figure out who is responsible for a business loss caused by a cyber event. That problem is being explored on SearchCIO.com this week and next.

The aggregation of network infrastructures with open APIs, the greater numbers of businesses using cloud services, the sheer amount of information and the nature of that data — all pose enormous risks, said Drew Bartkiewicz, senior vice president of technology and new media markets for The Hartford Financial Services Group in New York. “You talk about credit card data. . . . That’s so 2000,” he said. “Companies’ forecasts, people’s social reputations — whether they’re part of a gun group or are surfing a dating site when they’re married — all that data is becoming grounds for information malpractice,” he said.

“I think with the recession that is upon us we are going to see an even more dramatic increase in cybercrime and opportunistic hacking,” said Snyder, a litigation partner at the New York office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Data breaches have exploded in recent years, despite better technology, despite greater awareness of cyberattacks, Snyder said.

The scenario?

“You have a recession creating more cybercriminals. There is more and more digitization every day as companies accelerate their move from bricks and mortars to the Internet as they are closing stores and centralizing online, and then, of course, the sophistication of the hacking,” Snyder said.

“I think that is almost an unholy trinity of events that will result in an even greater incidence in the coming years of data breach problems,” Snyder said.

Make that unholy quartet.

“What is unfortunate is that companies, as they are laying off and retrenching, are going to budget even less and less for prevention and technology to deal with data breach problems,” Snyder said.

As economic pressures mount, companies will also likely see dramatic increases in employee misuse of data, Snyder predicts, recounting a recent conversation with someone at a major financial institution. “They said that since September there has been a two-fold increase in petty financial crimes, employee-caused –$2,000, $4,000, $6,000 being taken out of bank customer’s account by an employee — not massive theft, but it all adds up.”

Joining Snyder in a discussion on data security was his colleague from Gibson Dunn, Alexander Southwell, also a former federal prosecutor and securities fraud expert; Adam Smith, chief legal officer at Terremark Worldwide Inc.; and panel moderator Alan Brill, senior marketing director of Kroll Ontrack Inc.