Ben Oliver

Ben has been advising businesses on digital transformation for over 20 years, and he’s done almost all of it right here at Workiro. Starting out as a consultant way back in 2001, he soon took on a full-time business development role working with businesses that were still handling the earliest days of the move to full digitisation - often in the face of stiff resistance from senior leadership. 

He went on to lead our support and consulting organisation before becoming Head of Projects, working directly with a wide range of businesses who came to Workiro looking for ways to bring in technological solutions for old-fashioned business problems. His work covered just about every department and every industry, always starting with a deep analysis of the real-world problems each team faced and developing a digital workflow to solve it. He’s helped accounts-payable teams introduce automated workflows, migrated national businesses from paper-based silos to unified digital platforms, and been part of everything from initial pitch calls through multi-year after-sales care. 

He’s worked directly with a huge range of businesses in the UK, US, Canada and Australia, from small firms up to global organisations - and more than a few in the transition between the two. He’s spent a lot of time in a lot of different offices, and his commitment to doing right by the customer - a previous CEO was known to promise that “Ben will sleep in your office until you’re happy” - means he started every project by learning the specific needs of each organisation. As a result, he developed a deep understanding of the practical, cultural and political issues that must be navigated to deliver successful customer transformation. 

It also put him in all the conversations about how the Workiro platform developed, which ultimately lead to him stepping up to Technical Director in 2009 and then Chief Technology Officer in 2017, overseeing the development of Workiro’s ever-expanding suite of tools. His years spent in the trenches talking to CEOs right down to the administrative assistants has given him unrivalled insight into the everyday problems that hold things up at businesses large and small, and he was able to bring that to bear on guiding how Workiro could solve them.

In more recent years his focus has returned to our clients, with a stint as our senior VP of Strategy enabling him to carry out extensive research on the rapidly-changing landscape of productivity software, before stepping up to be our first Chief Customer Officer where he’s able to put those insights to practical use. His day-to-day work includes supporting existing customers, consulting with new businesses, and leveraging his years of experience to inform guides to the next generation of business transformation. In his spare time, he’s recently signed up to the Caterham Academy - kicking off a personal, if perhaps not permanent, transformation into a racing driver.