Dia Nag: tech needs better stories
Dia Nag believes digital transformation is not really about technology. It is about understanding problems, challenging assumptions and designing services around the people who use them. Women in Westminster sat down with the former Whitehall digital leader to find out why storytelling may be one of the most important skills in tech
Digital transformation is often presented as a purely technical exercise. Clever coding. Better data. Smarter software.
But for Dia Nag, successful digital transformation never starts with lines of computer code. It truly begins when you are clear on the story that you need to tell.
“My background is a master’s in English literature, which has nothing to do with technology,” she explained to Women in Westminster early on during our sit-down conversation. “But that gave me the tools and the weapons to tell stories.”
It was hardly an obvious route into digital leadership. Nag began her career as an assistant editor at Macmillan before moving into journalism, working for the Times of India and India Today. Her move into digital, she admits, was not part of any carefully constructed career plan.
“It was not a choice that I made consciously,” she says. “It just happened, and I started enjoying it so much.”
Storytelling is a recurring theme throughout our conversation. For Nag, stories are how you turn the language of digital transformation into something people can understand and, crucially, connect it to the problems the technology is aiming to solve.
“Digital transformation, service delivery – these are big terms, right?” Nag tells us. “But what it comes down to is you are just using a piece of technology. You’re using data to solve real problems. If you can explain that story in a simple way, then that’s when the real impact happens.”
That approach became particularly important when Nag moved from publishing and journalism into the UK public sector, first at Parliament and later at Government Digital Service and the Cabinet Office.
At the Cabinet Office, Nag was among the founding members of its Digital Directorate and led work on strategy and digital transformation. That often meant changing the terms in which transformation itself was routinely discussed.
Nag recalls early conversations with senior colleagues and stakeholders who would often see a shiny new piece of technology and immediately demand something similar. She explains that she always strove to bring the conversation back to the problem that they needed to solve rather than leaping too quickly to a perceived solution.
“They didn’t always really understand user needs and sometimes focused more on the business needs, which are often not the same thing,” she says. “Sometimes you need to take a step back and say, ‘yeah, this thing is great, but what do you actually want to achieve?’ You always need to focus on the outcome.”
Focusing on outcomes has been the common thread throughout Nag’s career. She has now left the Civil Service and returned to the private sector with Capgemini, although her work continues to bring her into close contact with public-sector organisations.
Having sat on both sides of the table, Nag says she is struck less by the differences in ambition than by the different constraints under which people operate.
“There’s such great stuff that happens at Whitehall, and there’s such great people,” she says. “Coming to this side has made me realise we share the same passion. It’s just how we do it is different.”
Nag's own unconventional route into technology also informs the way she thinks about another challenge facing the sector – whether women believe it is a valid career path for them in the first place.
Despite the distance the sector has travelled, women continue to be underrepresented, particularly in leadership positions. Nag argues that some barriers are structural, including disparities in pay and progression. But another can arise much earlier, through the way the sector describes itself.
“When we say, ‘women in tech’, that is often understood as women who do software engineering, right?” she says. “But that also becomes a barrier because people think if you’re not a software engineer or coder, you cannot enter the profession. We need to change that story. We are delivering outcomes. We are not delivering technology.”
She also reminds us that, as tasks once regarded as the preserve of technical specialists are increasingly automated, understanding people, identifying their needs, and communicating effectively will remain distinctly human parts of the job.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” she says. “With the rise of AI, it’s the people skills, it’s the people-centricity, which is going to stay. And that’s the bit where human intervention is always needed.”
Nag has demonstrated a drive to address the barriers women in tech face throughout her career. At the Cabinet Office, she founded Women in Digital, helping women explore roles across that wider ecosystem. But Nag recognises that the confidence women need to put themselves forward rarely appears out of nowhere. In her own case, its roots stretch back long before her career in technology.
“I was surrounded by really tough, strong women who believed in themselves,” Nag explains. “My mum taught me and my sister to be fiercely independent, never stopping ourselves from saying what we believed in.”
What that confidence gives you, Nag believes, is a willingness to tell your own story. And as she has become more senior, her focus has increasingly shifted towards helping other women do the same.
“I think I am moving on from telling my own story to helping others tell theirs,” she says.
After a career spent demonstrating the power of stories, Nag’s message to the next generation of women digital leaders is simple: don't wait for somebody else to tell yours.
