EP#113 Preventing Watermelon Reporting - With Katrina Macdermid

GovComms: The Future of Government Communication

Todays release of the GovComms Podcast features a discussion with Katrina Macdermid, Director of KayJayEm services.

Katrinas unique skillset has provided training and consulting for many agencies including the NSW Police Force, Sydney Metro & NSW Health who have all embraced Katrina's human approach to information technology (IT). Katrina is a contributing author to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) 4 official publication and has written white papers explaining how to incorporate human-centered design into IT service management.

The pair begin by discussing the development of her own innovative approach called human experience agreements. Katrina explains that when negotiating service level agreements with big providers, grabbing contracts from a year to three years before and simply updating them is no longer acceptable, and needs to change in order to prevent ‘watermelon reporting’.

Katrina goes on to state the importance of the customer and employee experience in relation to IT and why service providers need to come along on the journey. Katrina explains how, through service integration and management, she bought service providers along for the journey to see how they could collectively contribute to an organisation’s outcome.

David and Katrina go on to talk about creating personas through human-centered design. She advises communicators to be mindful of who you are communicating to, how they like to be communicated to and who is the decision-maker within their eco-system.

The pair end by discussing the importance of IT and the role those within the field have played throughout COVID-19 to remobilise organisations.

Discussed in this episode:

• The importance of IT within the field of communications
• How to implement and use human-centered design
• What human experience agreements can do for organisations