Without the data, the tools are useless; without the software, the data is unmanageable'?

So said Tim O'Reilly in September 2009, stating what at face value may seem a truism; but is it? In many organizations in both the private and public sectors technology has increasingly come to wag the dog, self evident in the catastrophic dislocation of global financial systems and the sequence of project over-runs and data loss in the public sector in the UK. Behind these failures has been an almost 'utopian' trust in technology to distribute and interpret huge volumes of data with little intervention or audit. Those responsible for managing risk within organizations have little understanding of the way in which technology (software) manages, analyses and distributes data. Their knowledge often stops at the screen and the keyboard, which has resulted in data being compromised in order either to accommodate available or emerging technologies. This presentation will argue that an outcome of the credit crunch will be a rebalancing of organizations away from technologies towards data that will raise important questions about authenticity, integrity and trust which are the stock in trade of archivists and records managers. Such a rebalancing in response to societal pressure and regulatory authorities will challenge the open-endedness and fluidity championed by the Web 2 community and negate the apparent cost savings delivered through the uncritical adoption of technological solutions to data management.