Allenna Leonard --

ISSS Meeting at Asilomar, June 28-July 2, 1999
  • Special Integration Group on Business and Industry, July 1, 1999, 1:30 p.m. 
These participant's notes were created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by Ian Simmonds at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center ( http://www.research.ibm.com ).
The auditor is the independent assessor of an exchange relationship. 
  • auditor is associated ... 
  • Eduardo's list of egocentric things is not looked at in traditional auditing 
Wilbur's 4 quadrant not observable observable
individual ? Foucault's Panopticon
Group ? Internal control systems

Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon assumes that: 

  • there is a way to know what someone ought to be doing 
  • there is a single perspective from which you can assess 
Distinction between Internally observable activity and the externally observable activity.

How to do rigorous auditing of reflection and future orientation?

How do you audit? 

  • Appropriate = relevant and reliable 
  • traditional audit focusses on reliability of the individual. For example, does that person have an identifiable bias? 
Now: 
  • is the audited [unit] operating with integrity, what are their intrinsic biases, do they have requisite variety? 
  • is the auditor fully present, what are their biases? 
  • how much is known, how much is unknown? 
  • how much noise is there in the system? 
  • sometimes the auditor acts as a facilitator 
  • sometimes they help the organization to integrate multiple perspectives 
  • reliability of the context, the records? 
  • integration of this information by the auditing team: the idea of the team is new -- use to be an auditor with assistants 
  • looking at Beer's operations room idea 
What counts as evidence: 
  • the unconscious -- deep structure, auditor's "nose", pattern recognition, forgotten information 
  • the conscious -- remembered information, what kinds of notes, what kinds of observation 
  • factors, circumstances and conditions increasing likelihood of a misstatement -- turbulence, rewards systems 
  • assumptions -- management good faith, going concern, (if not a going concern, then need "forensic auditing") 
  • context especially knowledge of business 
  • evidence supporting particular assertions 
This represents a pretty big change.

Need social justice: 

  • need basis for trust 
  • need mutuality 
David Hawk: 
  • assuming that we're talking about organizations, and how to make them more or less healthy 
  • a second system is the auditing system which is a mechanism to uncover deceit 
Enrique: what about the egocentric auditor? 
???: the idea of an intervention into an organization as being supported by the organization. 
Joe Arteaga: what is the role of the customer interfaces in auditing? A. The role of the internal audit.
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This page was last modified by David Ing on October 11, 1999.