Innovative accountability – session at OECD

Are auditors helping or hindering public sector innovation? Is it time for new accountability? Should auditors focus on assurance or recommendations? What can AI do for auditing? And… how can auditors be sure they are serving people?

These questions were discussed by the panellists – Taka Ariga, Marco Daglio, Martin Dees, Janar Holm and me. This is my three-minute-pitch to answer the question “how auditors can serve people?”:

“Auditors should start designing actionable knowledge. By making your audit a tool for change. And to do that, you must empathize – see your audit from other perspectives: What do they need? How does the entire system look like? And how can your audit influence that?”

“This is a design process for auditing, which is based upon the Double Diamond process. In the first step, you discover and define the function of the audit: what should your audit do? In this stage, you can use methods to understand the system and empathize with others in that system (please take a look at Misha Kaur’s work). Once you determined the purpose of your audit, you can design the form – what it is, how it works, what it looks like. Are we talking about a dashboard, or an interactive tool, or a participatory workshop with important stakeholders? As a designer, you will never know upfront what will come out of the journey. That is also why it is important to start designing during the audit and not just at the end of our audit.

By the way, I am a big fan of data and I think that auditors should jump on the data-train while they still can, because it already left the station. But to change the game, you have to see your audit as a tool to influence the system.”