Joint public-private action is impossible without joint situational awareness and joint situational understanding. Therefore the ability to establish a process that brings together the relevant state and non-state actors and creates joint situational understanding and awareness by mutually exchanging information between public and private actors must be interpreted as a national core competence. The high political relevance of this core competence is underlined by the fact that the Austrian Chancellery, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Defense actively participate in the project.

To this purpose the proposed research project had following aims:

1.    support the ongoing process of evaluating and further developing a public sector common relevant operational picture by providing conceptual insights from comparing similar approaches in other countries and leading multinational companies and eliciting lessons to be learned for Austria;

2.    outline who should be involved in exchanging security-relevant strategic information for the roles-based public-private operational picture and identify which public and private sector bodies could contributewhat kind of information to this common picture;

3.    advance public-private security cooperation in Austria by setting up the methodology of a roles-based public-private operational picture and improve coordination and cooperation between the relevant public agencies and selected companies through setting up a common platform for strategic information exchange.