The Australian Innovation Community

Successfully harnessing digital technologies to improve consumer services, business productivity and the delivery of government services requires the use of methodologies that incorporate stakeholder-specific information sharing rules for effectively governing mass scale distribution & receipt of prescribed information.

It is now widely recognised that information sharing between individuals, industry and government agencies can produce significant capability improvements, particularly in the following areas: Public order & safety; Law enforcement & justice administration; Counter terrorism intelligence; Emergency response; ‘Citizen Life Cycle’ service delivery.

Traditionally, the default information sharing approach has been to use ‘Party-to-Party’ arrangements that produce neither optimal nor enduring results and take more time & money than anticipated. Abundant evidence demonstrates that benefits diminish exponentially as the numbers of sharing parties increase. In addition, ownership issues have been inadequately addressed resulting in disputes between participating parties.
The limitations of this default approach build barriers to widespread application because Party-to-Party information sharing is difficult to extend to multiple parties for both technical and administrative reasons.

These barriers promote dysfunctional interactions between organisations and impede mutual goals or outcomes that should be universally defined and met in trust, under a legal structure that both supports IT and reflects successful human organisational aspects. Without these characteristics, we will continue to witness disputes as recently reported between the AFP and ASIO and discussed in the Street Report.

People have been building the problem while attributing failure to technology that, in isolation, is unable to address the fundamental issues of ownership and rights.

The technology evolution path did not foresee at its beginning that society would call for universal collaboration, particularly within and between government agencies. As a result, divergence of the implied relationship between information management and social expectations has occurred over the course of this evolution.

The next evolutionary step is to make information sharing to the masses possible on a low-cost basis, and to overlay that with a social structure that makes the process orderly, inviting and rewarding.

Balian has designed a methodology that significantly improves information exchange capability between any numbers of competitive or allied organisations and/or individuals, using business rule based concepts to build information exchange frameworks.

Our invention is called the ‘Balian New Information Exchange’ (Balian NIE©) which introduces a novel form of information exchange by: Adopting structures that have been proven over centuries and successfully employed for various purposes in several business contexts; Adapting these structures to the internet.

BALIAN NIE explicitly addresses the core information sharing issues of ownership, privacy, probity, rewards and obligations, responsibility and risk management, in concert with IT, in a way that the advancement of society can be rapidly accelerated and more effectively achieved.

BALIAN NIE enables iterative creation and deployment of information exchanges and truly represents a future ‘Information Age Road Map’ that upholds today’s most fundamental expectations of society.

Following principles of 'social infrastructure', Balian NIE overlays onto IT and enables better linkages between the capabilities of IT and people in their everyday work or social activities.

NIE is established under a Trust Deed which has been stamped at the NSW Stamp Duties Office and Balian has applied for an Australian Provisional Patent for the NIE.