Success factors and lessons learned during the implementation of a cooperative space for critical infrastructures

It is largely documented that the exchange of information among critical infrastructures (CIs) is crucial to strategies involving the identification of their interdependencies and increasing their resilience. Based on the experience of the Centre Risque & Performance, Polytechnique Montréal (Québec, Canada), this paper presents the outcomes of a 15-year project that led to the development of DOMINO: a tool capable of identifying interdependencies among CIs and simulating potential domino effects of their failure. This paper illustrates how multi-organisational collaboration can help solve complex problems and shares lessons learned from the DOMINO initiative, which corroborates several observations documented in the literature. This paper suggests that, in order for effective and long-term collaboration to occur between CIs, not only must there be a sustainable governance framework in place, but upstream works must be conducted within these large organisations to encourage them to adopt, internally, more strategic, transversal and integrated risk management approaches.