Katrina Macdermid Leads Humanising-IT

AmplifyHER Feature | October 2026

Katrina Macdermid leads through expertise, originality and sustained contribution. As AmplifyHER opens October’s focus on AI service design through delivery, her work provides a clear starting point: understand people’s needs, design around their experience and verify what improves.

For more than two decades, Katrina has helped bring culture, empathy, leadership and design into IT service management. In recognition of that contribution, Pink Elephant inducted her into its prestigious 2026 ITSM Hall of Fame. This honor, a citation that elevates her influence on how IT professionals think about and deliver services.

From Framework to Experience

Katrina created the Humanising IT™ Double Diamond Framework and contributed to ITIL® 4. Through her writing and training, she connects human-centred design with the operational responsibilities of service management. Consequently, her work gives teams a way to examine whether a functioning process also produces a useful experience.

Katrina MacDermid Humanising IT Design books develop perspective:

  • Humanising IT: Human-centred Design for IT Service Management introduces human-centred design principles, tools and techniques for ITSM, including value stream mapping. TSO publishes the second edition.
  • Humanising IT™: The Experience Distortion of IT Service Management examines how service design can create friction between human needs and operational accountability. Moreover, itSMF UK’s May 2026 webinar explored how AI can accelerate that distortion.

 Recognition Reflects  Katrina's consistent and Sustained Contribution

A timeline of Katrina Macdermin's leadership record distinguishes individual honors, finalist recognition, editorial selections and team awards. Tells an amazing story as to why she is the top leader in our industry, and her work recognitions document contributions across service management, leadership and professional learning. 

Humanising AI Starts Here

As organizations accelerate AI adoption, Katrina’s work brings the service experience into the decision. Faster responses, fewer tickets and automated closure can indicate operational change. Teams must also establish whether people completed their tasks, received accurate help and retained access to human support.

Furthermore, Katrina co-created Humanising AI™. The HIT Lens™ asks teams to consider who benefits, who may be disadvantaged and where humans should remain involved. That inquiry connects automation choices with trust, experience and accountability.

Design for people. Test the experience. Then automate.

Make Expertise Shape Decisions

September 2026 UN Women reporting places women at around 22% of AI professionals globally and fewer than 14% of senior AI leadership positions. These figures describe representation and authority; they do not measure expertise.


Turn Expertise Into Opportunity

When applications go unanswered, career paths shift, and leadership doors stay closed, people need opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities. WomenAILabs and AmplifyHER bring students, experienced professionals, and emerging leaders together to learn, contribute, and make their work visible.

For students struggling to differentiate themselves, practical challenge labs connect classroom learning to real service problems. Participants can build portfolio examples, explain their decisions, and document what they contributed.

For women submitting hundreds of résumés without an interview—or facing silence after initial interest—, AmplifyHER offers another way to gain visibility through demonstrations, shared expertise, and evidence of meaningful work.

For women who keep hitting the leadership glass ceiling, leading a workshop, guiding a process redesign, or presenting findings creates opportunities to demonstrate judgment and influence decisions. Experienced leaders also help participants strengthen their contributions and professional connections.

For laid-off AI professionals questioning whether their former roles will return, collaborative projects provide a practical way to retool, apply transferable experience, and explore new directions.

Here is how we help:

  • Practice: Join a challenge lab focused on a specific AI service problem.
  • Build: Produce useful work, such as a process map, prototype, test, or improvement proposal.
  • Learn: Exchange feedback with peers, practitioners, and advisors.
  • Lead: Facilitate a discussion, teach a skill, or demonstrate a solution.
  • Show: Document your role, decisions, and results; share contributions through demonstrations and AmplifyHER stories.

Participation creates opportunities to build skills, evidence, and relationships. Employment and promotion still depend on hiring decisions, but participants gain concrete work they can discuss with confidence.

This October, bring what you know and choose what you want to develop. Help us update service practices for AI while building evidence of your own growth. Teach. Learn. Lead.

October:  Participate in Best Practices. Produce AI Track Guides.  Nominate Leaders

Accordingly, October’s call to action is practical: credit a woman’s original work, invite her judgment into service design and apply one lesson to a measurable improvement.

Start by identifying where a person struggles. Then record the obstacle, assign an owner and test the revised experience with affected users. Finally, compare the outcome with the baseline before expanding automation.

Amplify the expertise. Share the authority. Build services people can trust.