Abstract

For Supreme Audit Institutions to live up to the expectations of Parliament and the public and meet the needs of the public sector organisations they audit, they need to break out of their traditional knowledge-driven role of public spending watchdogs. Human-centred design offers an alternative to more knowledge: knowledge-in-action. Yet, the current frame of auditors restrains them from experimenting with alternatives. This study shares our experiences as in-house designers at the Netherlands Court of Audit of enriching the current focus on siloed public administration with citizens’ perspectives and of finding alternative ways to increase audit impact. Moreover, we show the crucial role that in-house designers can play to help auditors break out of their audit profession in a manageable, non-disruptive way, while staying true to their fundamental principles.

Keywords

Supreme Audit Institutions; in-house designers; innovation; human-centred design

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Oct 9th, 9:00 AM

In-house designers to break out public sector auditing in a manageable way

For Supreme Audit Institutions to live up to the expectations of Parliament and the public and meet the needs of the public sector organisations they audit, they need to break out of their traditional knowledge-driven role of public spending watchdogs. Human-centred design offers an alternative to more knowledge: knowledge-in-action. Yet, the current frame of auditors restrains them from experimenting with alternatives. This study shares our experiences as in-house designers at the Netherlands Court of Audit of enriching the current focus on siloed public administration with citizens’ perspectives and of finding alternative ways to increase audit impact. Moreover, we show the crucial role that in-house designers can play to help auditors break out of their audit profession in a manageable, non-disruptive way, while staying true to their fundamental principles.

 

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