Audit and R&D

A fundamental property of audit dynamics is known as Goodhart's law: What's counted counts. (The next most succinct is When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.)
Studies, considered the origins of the audit culture -- an emergent phenomenon of formidable power -- and the increasing recognition. Today, that while auditing is useful and necessary for some purposes it is not the Answer to Everything, and indeed that the drive to audit everything, and to constrain everything by rigid rules, measures, and targets, `can entirely shut down the drive for innovation' and auditing everything has infinite cost.
There seems to have emerged an audit culture in the deepest sense of the word, involving sets of largely unconscious assumptions that have somehow become embedded in the minds of many people. What are the most basic principles behind the drive to audit everything? Arguably, they are fairness, objectivity, and prudence. What could be more reasonable, or more worthy of our aspirations? What could be more essential to a modernized democratic society? These principles seem to be deeply embedded in the minds of many journalists, politicians, and members of the public.
Our Principle says among other things that `performance' must be measured numerically. How else, indeed, can one fairly and objectively determine anyone's salary? But People can be trusted provided that they audit themselves. Because advanced human societies need a highly skilled, intelligent, reliable, enterprising workforce, they will come to recognize, notwithstanding the hyper credulity instinct that auditing and measuring everything is both a mirage and a huge waste of resources. There's actually no alternative to reliance on trust -- and to rebuilding trust where necessary -- for instance trust in professional ideals and ethics. An advanced society will recognize this explicitly and live with the risks. It will use auditing resources in new and cost-effective ways by concentrating them not on trying to monitor and measure everything but, rather, on checks and balances against gross human failings. It will find new ways of valuing and encouraging professional ideals and ethics, instead of devaluing and discouraging them through Principles.
It will find new ways of promoting flexibility rather than rigidity. Perhaps we can hope for an increasing public acknowledgement of these points by more of our journalists and politicians, perhaps even some soundbites from the heights of government, daring to say that auditing and rigid rules are subject to Goodhart's law and not the Answer to Everything.
The audit culture, collectively speaking, thus fails to remember that human beings, along with other life forms, normally and naturally deal with numbers of unforeseen, and unforeseeable, possibilities. Many of these are, of course, ways for things to go wrong; and humans are quite good at coping with things going wrong, provided their hands aren't tied too tightly. By the same token, rigidity would be a recipe for vastly increasing the number of things that go wrong, especially in complex systems engineering like computer software and genetic engineering, and in medicine, in education, and in human societies themselves. The audit culture is, collectively, ignorant of all this. In promoting and enforcing single pathways and single `best practices' to cover all circumstances it unconsciously assumes that people are, or ought to be, simple machines, like clockwork, predictable and controllable in simple ways.
It is an old mistake, one of the worst mistakes of Enlightenment thinking and, incidentally, a prime reason for the misuse of science and the distrust of science. `Look what Newton did with planetary dynamics; let's do the same with social dynamics!' It's exactly the mistake that led first to behaviourist psychology and then to the horrifying experimentation on humans and human societies by 20th-century totalitarian states. We are reaching new levels of self-understanding, scientifically as well as intuitively. We are beginning to respect in full measure the complex reality not only of humans, not only of computer networks, but also of `simple' life forms as they used to be called sordid details.

Public services performance assessment
When the question of delivery is raised governments refer to workable budget allocated for running public services and education, health and other services. But, it has been clear that extra funding is not enough to improve performances. The Government has created several major new inspectorates and marking every public service subject to inspection. Therefore, the number of inspectors has soared and according to the Government's own figures the cost of inspection has more than doubled since 1999.
However, despite the claims and counterclaims that inspection does not deliver efficient services, the truth is that there are not any documents and knowledge about the impacts of inspection in the UK. Since there are different approaches to inspecting local council services in England, Scotland and Wales, undertaking comparative study can elaborate on difference of outcomes. In England, the Government has adopted a hard-edged approach based on targets and league tables which 'name and shame' the worst authorities. By comparison, Scotland and Wales have pursued a more consensual approach. They have less inspection of councils and ministers generally try to sort out problems of poor performance through partnership working and behind the scenes negotiations. Therefore difference of performance management has potential for future research studies.
However who and where you serve matters a lot, , in the NHS, local government, the water industry or even in sectors like banking,. ‘Performance’, as measured by perceptions, is to some degree beyond the control of individual organisations – it is quite strongly linked to the characteristics of the local population that they serve. Because of this there are real dangers in comparing performance, however it is measured without taking into account local context in which public services are operating.

Today’s public services have to meet customer expectations. But how well these expectations and priorities understood?
There are some key features:
• simplicity
• speed of access and service
• good communications
• good customer care
• core services delivered to a high standard.
Most people still feel that public services fall short of their expectations. In local government, for example, only one in three people are satisfied with the way their complaint was handled, exactly the same as a decade ago. Part of the challenge is that expectations are rising for many aspects of customer care and accessibility, not necessarily on service standards per se. Ipsos MORI’s analysis of customer satisfaction for the Cabinet Office highlights the role of comparisons in driving expectations – and it is access and customer service that the private sector uses to differentiate itself from its competitors.
And public services can be much better at identifying what really matters to the public, so that they are optimising what they do, and not investing resource in elements of their service that simply don’t make any difference to the public. If public expectations are growing and citizens are measuring what you deliver against these expectations, then this means that departments must focus on what the public regards as core – but not to the detriment of elements of a service that are essential in professional terms. It means being clear about what is essential technically, medically or professionally and what really matters to the people you serve.
Overall, the analysis throws new light on perceptions and the factors that are – and are not – under local public service managers’ control. There is always room for improvement, but it does highlight the need for any system of assessing overall performance to properly reflect local conditions, rather than assuming everyone faces exactly the same issues – without condoning weak performances. In meeting the challenges the public lays down for public services – we must remember that with increasing difference and diversity, one size will not fit all.

Source:
A fair measure of success? How performance assessment of public bodies may be falling short, Public Services Research Project: Correlates of Success in Performance Assessment, Oxford University, 2005
Page, B., Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute and Ipsos MORI Public Affairs.