DTX Unplugged

In this episode of DTX Unplugged, hosts Ollie Pickup and Sabrina Berko sat down with Gina Gill, Chief Information Officer at Apollo, live at DTX London 2025 to unpack the realities of digital transformation across both public and private sectors.

Together, they explore what it really means to transform while keeping the business running, why curiosity and learning are non-negotiable leadership traits, and how focusing on user needs - not just shiny new tech - can make or break transformation efforts. Gina also shares her perspective on why the insurance industry is such an exciting, data-driven space, offers examples of meaningful transformation done right, and leaves business leaders with practical advice for navigating the messy middle of change!

Key Takeaways:
  • Transformation is about keeping operations running while evolving
  • The term “transformation” is broad - clarity of purpose is essential
  • Superficial fixes (“lipstick on a pig”) won’t solve structural issues
  • Curiosity and continuous learning are critical for effective leadership
  • Too many organisations focus on tech instead of user needs
  • Learning velocity helps teams adapt faster to change
  • Sometimes, “boring” services drive the greatest efficiency
  • The insurance sector is inherently data-driven and ripe for innovation
  • Leaders should define a clear vision anchored in user outcomes
  • Adaptability is key to thriving through transformation
“You can’t pause business-as-usual to transform. The real challenge is keeping the lights on while changing how everything works.” – Gina Gill

🎙️ Catch this special episode that was recorded LIVE at DTX London 2025!
🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
📌 Check out our website at dtxevents.io
🔗 Connect with Gina on LinkedIn

Creators and Guests

Host
Ollie Pickup
Award-winning technology and business journalist
Host
Sabrina Berko
Head of Content, Clarion Events

What is DTX Unplugged?

DTX Unplugged delves into the major challenges and innovations shaping business transformation, embodying our event's focus on the critical intersection of people, process, and technology. While rooted in the DTX ethos, this will be an industry-focused platform, tackling key issues, spotlighting groundbreaking innovations, and raising awareness for important topics across the sector.

Speaker 1:

One, two, three,

Speaker 2:

four. Welcome to DTX Unplugged, the podcast that gets to the heart of business evolution. I'm Sabrina Berco, head of content at Clarion Events, the organizers behind DTX.

Speaker 1:

And I'm Ollie Picker, an award winning technology and business storyteller. Each episode, we sit down with leaders, innovators, and changemakers who are reshaping how organizations think about transformation.

Speaker 2:

Whether you're leading, implementing, or building transformation strategy, this is your monthly dose of insights from the people making it happen.

Speaker 3:

This is all about

Speaker 1:

the critical intersection of people, process, and technology, and the real stories behind successful evolution.

Speaker 2:

What are we waiting for?

Speaker 1:

Let's dive in. Welcome to episode three of DTX Unplugged, and we're doing something rather special today. We're recording live at DTX London on October 2 right after a fascinating panel discussion with our guest. We're joined by Gina Gill, chief information officer at Apollo, which is an insurance group, and you joined there in March. But before that, Gina spent over a decade transforming digital services across UK government at the highest level.

Speaker 1:

I know you don't like the word transformation, and we're gonna get into that in a minute. At the Ministry of Justice, Gina managed a £400,000,000 budget and led 1,500 people delivering 800 digital services to over 100,000 staff. She then moved to the cabinet office as executive director of the UK government digital and data office, where she led 30,000 digital professionals across government and shaped national transformation strategy. And we've just come off the main stage from a panel that was asking, is your workforce ready for what's next? It was a session that I moderated, and Gina was brilliant.

Speaker 1:

There were heated discussions about automation, upskilling, and whether we're inadvertently becoming less sharp by relying too heavily on AI. And after this podcast recording, Gina will be presenting when the worlds collide, transformation lessons from public and private sectors. So we're gonna be talking about, well, both both of those sessions today. You've had a piece recently in computer weekly, which was called delivering digital government. It's bracket still not about technology, and that went viral in the tech community for its brutal honesty about why transformation keeps failing.

Speaker 1:

So we want a lot of that brutal honesty today, Gina. And you describe yourself as fascinated by technology, passionate about people. Thanks a lot for coming on the podcast. Thank you much

Speaker 3:

for having me. Thank you for having me. I'm really enjoying it.

Speaker 4:

Welcome, Gina. It's so lovely

Speaker 3:

to have you

Speaker 4:

here. We always start with our three core questions for every guest, and then we have one final one at the end. So firstly, what's the most significant transformation challenge hitting business leaders right now? I think it's

Speaker 3:

trying to transform whilst at the same time keeping things running. Right? Someone mentioned this on on stage earlier, the the analogy of flying in an an airplane while you're trying to change the wings or maybe even what an airplane is. Whether it's public sector, whether it's the London insurance market, other sectors, I I think you see that across all of those areas. And that leads to big questions around as you said, I I don't love the word transformation.

Speaker 1:

You said you hated it, Gina. Let's be honest.

Speaker 3:

I did. I did. It's so overused. Transformation to an individual person could be this tiny change whilst it could be this huge kind of rip up our whole way of doing things and start again. And I think one word to describe both of those extremes is a bit dark and unhelpful.

Speaker 3:

Defining what transformation is particularly difficult in a world where there's a a pressure to reimagine ways of doing things, but the world around us is just changing so much all the time that it's difficult to kind of land on what that new way of doing things might be. There's big questions for people about talent. That's both finding the right talent to deliver today, but also to the conversation we had earlier, what is the workforce of the future and what skills and capabilities do we need? How do you take people on that journey with you? How do you get the right balance between fixing the small things today and and fixing the big things in the future?

Speaker 3:

When I started in government, RPA was all the rage. You know? Everyone was trying to sell it, and ministers were talking about it, and it was gonna solve everyone's problems. And I was told before I joined, it was blockchain, and, you know, before I left, it was it was AI. And I remember arriving and thinking, no.

Speaker 3:

We're not doing it. Right? Lipstick on a pig, we're not doing it. It will cover up all of the stuff underneath that needs to be fixed. And then I remember going to see colleagues in the legal aid agency caseworkers, and this caseworker was going through this PDF document manually trying to extract data points and keep them into another system, when that data already existed in another system in the organisation somewhere else.

Speaker 3:

They were spending hours a day doing this. I went to see probation officers who were spending 80% of their time keying data into systems or rekeying data, 20% of their time with people on probation. And I walked away thinking, we're gonna have to put lipstick on the pig.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Right? You have to, but then you have to recognize that that's what you're doing, and you have to come back and make sure you fix the pig.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I mean, it's so true. Particularly in the public sector, I was talking to someone who works at the NHS the other day, and they were saying the problem is people often view the NHS as one big fish. Actually, it's very small fish, hopefully going in the right direction. Each of those little fish has its own data silo, and it's massive problem.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. We have, on our advisory board, have someone from the Royal Fowler of Chelsea and Kensington, he was talking about the issues of the systems not speaking to each other because they all operate as separate organisations almost and nothing is interoperable, it's just this whole

Speaker 3:

complex system. And and there's an interesting kind of parallel there between government so leaving government, that's clearly a problem. You've got silos. You've got silos of data. You've got silos within government departments.

Speaker 3:

When I came out, I thought, okay, I don't have to deal with that problem anymore. It's straight into the Lloyds of London market where it's a marketplace and it's trying to digitise. One of the problems with digitisation is there is no common data standards, there's no common data model. And that makes it really, really difficult when you're passing information across different organizations of different sizes and different types to actually create that change. So you have a parallel there.

Speaker 3:

In in banking, you had open banking, right? And that was about sharing data. And so I think that's a problem that exists. Assume that it's a public sector only problem, but it's not.

Speaker 1:

I think

Speaker 3:

it's a much broader problem.

Speaker 4:

I'm sure you've been exposed to so many different organisations and some of the projects that they've done. Can you share a transformation example that genuinely impressed you and why?

Speaker 3:

When I was at the MOJ, delivering technology and sales to offenders was making a huge difference to their engagement with the system prospects than when leave prison. We were doing work in making the process less onerous and hopefully less traumatic for people to apply for criminal injuries compensation, for example. Right? So lots of examples from that world. But I think for me, the genuinely impressive transformations are more organisational and more about changing culture, ways of working, language in an organisation.

Speaker 3:

And actually, I've been reflecting about this since leaving government. I think government digital has genuinely created quite a big shift in parts of government, not everywhere, but in parts of government. In terms of that language, I could use the term agile ceremonies or scrum, and and people wouldn't assume that I was talking about rugby in in in government. Right? So so so really, it had changed the the language.

Speaker 3:

And if I look outside, I remember speaking to someone that was working Microsoft, and this was a a short while after Satya Nadella had had had arrived. And they were talking about the change that he brought to that organization just in thinking about what it was there to do and therefore what its products and services could and should be and the language that they used. And I think there's an interesting case study there of driving that change perhaps a little less noisily than GDS did in government And maybe it would have landed a bit better in some places if it had been a quieter evolution rather than kind of this big push for revolution.

Speaker 1:

What's interesting you mentioned Satya Nadella there, he has brought in this culture where curiosity is the sort of watchword. And perhaps that's not something that is allowed in public or private sector

Speaker 3:

companies. I disagree.

Speaker 1:

Great.

Speaker 3:

This is

Speaker 1:

what we want.

Speaker 3:

I used to complain about this a lot. In my job in MOJ, I used to go on and on about the fact we needed to be more curious as teams and as individuals. And actually, we did. We did a lot of learning from outside of government. We were learning about skills and ways of working and how to organize ourselves and how to govern ourselves from tech companies.

Speaker 3:

And, again, here, I am hugely encouraging the teams to learn from outside the the market. The the London insurance market is a is a really interesting place. Apollo deliberately recruited me from outside the market because they wanted some outside in thinking. And that was because you can end up with grip think in an industry. You can end up not actually really transforming, but perfecting what you've already got.

Speaker 3:

So I do think that curiosity is there and and is allowed and is is important.

Speaker 4:

Interesting. So in your opinion then, where do most leaders go wrong finding the balance between kind of people, process, technology? Is it the lack of curiosity?

Speaker 3:

I I think lack of curiosity. Absolutely. I think the other thing I'd put up there is too much focus on technology. Right, especially when there's something new, it doesn't feel like new anymore, new ish on the block. People say, yeah, I want a bit of that.

Speaker 3:

I remember someone messaging me when

Speaker 1:

I was

Speaker 3:

in public sector. I got an email saying, I think we need AI prison visit mechanism. What would you do with AI in terms of booking the prison visit? Fairly straightforward ish process. Everyone wanted to put AI everywhere and and assumed it was the answer to everything, and I think organizations do have a tendency to think about the solution before they spend enough time thinking about why are we doing this.

Speaker 3:

The other thing I'd say is focusing, really focusing on users. If you look at banking, where I spent many years before going into public sector, they went through transformation. And that transformation was effectively perfecting the same way of doing what they've been doing, right? The channel shifted. They shifted from branch to phone to online, but the actual service was still the same.

Speaker 3:

It was shaped by the same people, it was shaped by the same compliance people, was shaped by the same people that could spend twenty years doing that thing. And what they didn't do enough of was go and ask the question of is it that people want from this service or need from this service. So I think that's also what we've got on.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I agree. And I think your point about transformation probably carries through to AI as this sort of catch all term, isn't it? People People are are using AI. Listeners won't know, but there sort was of eye roll there from Gina. But thinking about the technology process people, we were just talking about that on stage now, and you made a really good point about how the workforce needs to be adaptable.

Speaker 1:

Maybe you can share some key takeaways from that session.

Speaker 3:

I think people often ask, you know, what are the technical skills of the future? What should we be training in today? And I don't think it's about technical skills. I think it's about the ability to learn new things and to continuously learn new things. I think it's about curiosity.

Speaker 3:

I think it's about empathy and an ability to work with and communicate with people that have got different skill sets, different backgrounds, different experiences than than you do. Those are the skill sets that then give you the agility to be able to respond to whatever happens next.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. And on stage again, I talked about learning velocity and how there needs to be an example set by leaders. I'm wondering if Apollo how you set the example.

Speaker 3:

Apollo's a really interesting organization. So it is 300 ish people, and I I was looking forward to leaving behind huge amounts of complexity and coming into a much simpler organization. It's a really complex organization for 300 people because it is effectively, like, a number of different businesses under one banner. And each of those businesses has clarity of of kind of goal and purpose. But outside of that, there's a huge amount of encouragement to experiment.

Speaker 3:

I remember my first conversation with the exec. My reflection was when I was in government, I felt like I had digital capability that had been built over many, many years, but working in a very traditional organisation, that was the tension. And when I arrived at Apollo, I had the agile organisation that I'd always wanted to work in, but with me not quite there on on on on the digital skills. That does come from the top down. It comes from the CEO.

Speaker 3:

It comes from the chief underwriting officer. It comes from the leadership of the organization.

Speaker 4:

So now that you're in the private sector, are you still experiencing the same systemic barriers, just with different names?

Speaker 3:

Yes and no. As a market, Lloyds has some parallels with government in terms of those systemic barriers, in terms of data and standards and being able to share data across organisations. That's difficult. But a lot of the things that frustrated me in government, I don't have anymore,

Speaker 1:

I'm

Speaker 3:

happy to say. So we are shifting to agile ways of working. We're moving our governance in that direction. It is easier and faster to get things done. There is more trust, and that's I mean, that's a great feeling to come out of a big complex system and go into an organization where there is clarity and curiosity and a desire to experiment and try things.

Speaker 1:

What elements do you miss, if any?

Speaker 3:

I do miss the learning from outside. When you work in the MO chain, it's a big organisation. If you want to go and have a conversation with Google or AWS about how they do something, can. That's much harder in a 300 person organisation in the London market. I miss that.

Speaker 4:

And when you, in your Computer Weekly piece, argued that digital transformation often fell because of outdated policy designs, funding models, procurement, things rather than just technology. How do you then diagnose whether an organisation would have a technology problem or a systems problem?

Speaker 3:

I don't think organisations have technology problems. I think organisations have system problems. If you've got problematic technology, it is because something was wrong outside of the technology itself. Something was wrong in the governance and the funding and the vision direction setting.

Speaker 1:

Can you give us a sneak peek at what you're going to be talking about on stage later? Any kind of killer stats or examples that

Speaker 3:

you can share? I'm gonna talk about the things that I love, learned, and missed by working in public sector. I'm gonna talk about the things that I am loving now that I'm back in the private sector. And then I'm gonna talk about some of the common challenges, and and we've touched on a a couple of those already, the kind of data and standards piece, the really understanding why piece and and not reinventing the wheel. The other couple of things that have been on my mind recently are at the risk of offending vendors that provide industry specific technology.

Speaker 3:

I don't understand why we're still buying big industry specific solutions anymore. We live in a tech world where you can buy the components to build pretty much anything that you need. There might be a few exceptions. But still, we go after the big shiny things.

Speaker 1:

I'm hearing some examples increasingly, actually, of companies that have invested large on tech products. Actually, they've become outdated very quickly. So maybe there is a need for greater agility there, greater awareness.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. And I hear lots of people talking about agility and modular architecture, and then in the same breath, they'll say, Oh, but I'm going go and buy that system there that solves all of these problems for me. It's like, Well, that's not the same thing as modular technology. That is creating tomorrow's monolith. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Then the kind of other thing that's been on my mind, I've got a blog about this recently, is about why we should be designing services that are boring and less intrusive. There are some services you just shouldn't need to know exist. I was even coming here this morning. The phone was pinging. I have my personal email.

Speaker 3:

I have my work email. I have Teams messages. I have WhatsApp messages. I even have a text message. So there's this constant kind of noise for people in in the background.

Speaker 3:

And I know it's not just me that gets hugely irritated by that. I think we're at saturation point. We as tech leaders need to to seriously think about how do we dial that down.

Speaker 1:

There was a Microsoft paper that came out quite recently that looked at how many times on average we get interrupted a day digitally, and it's 175 times a day. And it sounds as though you had 175 messages before you even came here to DTX London. But if you put that into perspective, go back to the fifties, you've got your desk job. That's like someone knocking on your door every five minutes. That's how that's how what it works out.

Speaker 3:

It's crazy. It's It's not sustainable.

Speaker 1:

No. Could you give an example of where a service could be boring? What are you thinking of when you say that?

Speaker 3:

I'll give you a public sector one and then I'll talk a little bit about sort of thinking where I am now. So in public sector, why do I need to interact with government at all?

Speaker 1:

There's a crisis.

Speaker 3:

Right. So if I lose my job, why doesn't government know I've lost my job and pay me the benefits I'm due? Why is there a barrier to that happening? There are services, particularly in government, where it should just happen in an ideal world, and there are examples of where it does in other countries.

Speaker 1:

Namely Estonia and

Speaker 3:

Denmark. Think Sweden has got some interesting things from, like, a tax return perspective. They fill in your tax return. Just you have to check it and sign it off for obvious reasons. But, again, that's taking away a huge amount of friction and work for people just using the data that exists.

Speaker 3:

Now there's lots of complexities around that in the background, but that for me is what the aim should be for government services. I don't want to know you exist. You should just be there in the background of life. And we're looking now at how do you create a single pane of glass for underwriters, or underwriters have to deal with lots of different systems today. And actually, we want to create a world where technology and data are there to help them to prioritise what they need to do, to assess the risks that you might underwrite, to be able to understand our risk, our portfolio level, etc.

Speaker 3:

And initially, my thinking was, oh, we could gamify this, we could make it really interesting. Actually, I think it just needs to be really simple. They should just be out there with people. That is a big part of their job and probably the more interesting part of

Speaker 1:

their I'm really interested as to why the insurance industry was so appealing to you because it strikes me as it's a really interesting space. I mean, people might not agree with that, but from a technology perspective, I find it fascinating.

Speaker 3:

It's fascinating. Like, the data aspect really appeals to me. If you think about where the world of technology is going, there's a huge focus on data, a huge focus on AI, etcetera. So it's an interesting space to be from that perspective. My CEO tells me that the London market is is a people industry, and I and and and it is.

Speaker 3:

But I argue that it's data industry, right? There is so much data. That was the appeal. The other appeal to me was the organisation. I liked them.

Speaker 3:

I liked their thinking. And that and the combination of the potential of what you can do with data, the things that you're into.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love that. We're going to ask the fourth and final question in a minute, but just on the joined up data point, Estonia, I think that when you're born, you get given your digital ID and that follows you every I mean, I know it's very topical at the moment in the news here. But you can do 99% of things online apart from get married and announce your divorce. So you actually have to meet it's really So

Speaker 3:

the the marriage thing, and I don't know where they've gotten with this, but before I left the government, we were speaking to the Estonian government, the digital agency, and they did a demo in the room of a service that they were building where you do the kind of application for marriage, where basically you go into the system and you can say, I'm going to marry this person. Then it pings that person and says, Do you want to marry

Speaker 1:

this Swipe left or right, you know? Anyway,

Speaker 3:

so they were definitely working

Speaker 1:

on that. Wow. My goodness.

Speaker 3:

Tinder for marriage. It's brilliant, right? One of my favorite moments in government was the CTO. He's the ex CTO for Ukraine, after Shwooping, and he came to talk to my team. And someone asked him question and he said, Look, you've just got to get over yourselves and get on with delivery.

Speaker 3:

You are not the only people that are facing these problems. Everyone's got these challenges, get on with it.

Speaker 4:

That's a brilliant piece of advice, to be fair.

Speaker 3:

It really was.

Speaker 4:

Given that, what piece of advice would you give to a business leader starting their transformation journey tomorrow rather than just get

Speaker 3:

over yourself and get on with it? I think be really clear on why. Like, spend enough time on why, and be really clear about that. And don't get hung up on the technology, like don't assume that you know the answer before you get started. Really focus on the users of the service that you are looking to transform and be ready for it to change.

Speaker 3:

Like, there I don't think there's any such thing as in year three or four or five, this is where we're gonna be, and it's gonna be done and dusted. And, you know, we can all go ahead and move on to a different organization or a different problem. It's difficult, though, isn't it?

Speaker 1:

Because, until recently, this idea of having a North Star, of having that vision, does that need to change as well?

Speaker 3:

I think it does. So I've been working on digital strategy at Apollo. And for me, it is building the capability in the broadest sense, the people, the technology, the data, the mindset to be able to take advantage of whatever comes next. Now I think if you just have that, then that's not enough. But I think and I I think alongside that, you need a vision that keeps moving.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Right? If you've done the work to build the the capability and the ability to adapt, then it's okay. And it's probably very it's probably good that it keeps moving.

Speaker 1:

I love that. Adaptability is definitely the watchword here. Gino, it's been absolutely brilliant to have you along. Thanks for being such a good sport in between your sessions. You're very, very busy today.

Speaker 1:

You mentioned your blog there. Where should people find out more about you and read your insights?

Speaker 3:

LinkedIn.

Speaker 1:

LinkedIn. Okay. Fantastic. Well, thanks again for joining us.

Speaker 3:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

You can find all the links and resources from today's conversation in our show notes. DTX Unplugged is brought to you by Clarion Events, the team behind the DTX shows, where business transformation leaders gather to share ideas and drive change.

Speaker 1:

If you're leading transformation in your organization, visit dtxevents.i0 to join the community. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep transforming.