Ben Wagenaar Email & Phone Number

Birmingham, West Midlands, Gb

Part of HS2's Innovation team, leading a number of high-value innovation projects with the aim of reducing cost and carbon from the construction phase, improving workforce safety and creating significant value to the HS2 programme for a lasting legacy in the UK. Since its inception, the HS2 Innovation team have made savings of over £600m and 1.5m CO2e from the programme.I look after the Stations portfolio, managing ideas and opportunities from our supply chain, funding trials to HS2 station sites and scaling successful solutions around the programme. The innovations are a mix of physical solutions, such as low-carbon power, and digital, including AI-driven project, logistics and material optimisation tools.

Birmingham, Gb

SRA Innovate is the first port of call for law firms and innovators requiring support in lawtech, and deliver a core SRA objective of increasing the adoption of new and emerging technology. My team helped design, develop and deliver trials and pilots to measure the benefit, impact and risks of technology in legal services.I developed a new innovation strategy for the SRA focused on evidence-based regulation and support, where we would work closely with legaltech and lawtech vendors to ensure their solutions were compliant. This included a new innovation methodology for delivering trials as a regulator while remaining impartial and able to publicise our findings.The role entailed working with government departments, other regulators, charities, law organisations, startups and innovators to help evidence the benefit that new technology can bring to the legal services sector.

Hounslow, England, Gb

Part of the Innovation and Automation team at Heathrow Airport, researching new and emerging technology to help solve business challenges around the airport. This involved the facilitation of ideas capture, stimulation of innovation and delivering evidence-based trials to prove the benefits of change for products, processes or services.Most of the team's trials operate in cutting-edge areas such as mixed realities, sustainability, enterprise mobility and the Internet Of Things, with a focus on automation.I also worked as a Virtual Product Owner for a number of employee apps as part of the Enterprise Mobility offering, using my technical experience to work with business owners.My broader role was about demonstrating the art of the possible, partnering support from our largest suppliers to new startups, devising and developing prototype solutions for our challenges. I also talked and evangelised about innovation and technology at various events, and co-founded the Airport Innovation Network to connect like-minded teams across the world.

London, Gb

OPEN Health was the first channel and discipline neutral agency in the health communications sector. My role at OPEN was split into two; as a digital evangelist, briefing our clients and internal teams on how digital media can support their business and marketing activities, including the opportunities they have access to. I also ran training and briefing sessions to raise awareness of digital media. I also operated as the lead technical liaison between our production team, third party digital partners, OPEN account teams and our clients' IT departments. This involved working together to solve production challenges and ensuring that we deliver what's best for the end-user, the audience, while considering client infrastructure or requirements.

Yardley, Pa, Us

My role changed to formally recognise my support for account teams and clients in understanding, shaping and delivering digital media within the pharmaceutical industry. I also helped develop our clients' digital portfolio and forged some very rewarding relationships with them.This included promoting awareness within our group and beyond of the digital team's capabilities, while continuing to take responsibility for the delivery of our solutions to clients. I also managed third party partners, support of our own web farm, intranet-based documentation and the integrated development environment for our technical team.I always remained actively involved in software development as a developer, and in 2010 brought our development team up to the latest Microsoft .NET and SQL Server platforms.

Yardley, Pa, Us

I joined Huntsworth Health at an exciting time as their digital presence was emerging quickly. Taking responsibility for delivery of all our digital media, I worked with our growing team to lower the overhead of some of our legacy projects while supporting them in the development of our new website platform. This has greatly helped the integrity and reliability of our digital products.As well as managing our web hosting centre and development infrastructure, I also looked after relationships with our external partners.A major part of my role was client-facing, bridging the gap between what our clients are aiming to achieve against what is technically possible. I also handled liaison between our clients’ IT teams, our own technical team and account handlers.

Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, Gb

Software developer for PayPoint, who process cash payments from the UK public to more than 400 utility, transport and mobile phone companies via local convenience stores. I worked on the high volume, high integrity transaction processing systems which collect in excess of £7 billion each year. We also produced many intranet applications to run the business, which is where I first started using the Microsoft .NET Framework.In my last year, I was also involved in the development of a new international platform to allow the company to expand into Romania. The software I provided for this platform involved the Romanian mobile telecoms providers and was the first PayPoint service to be successfully launched there.

In 2003 I was promoted to Application Services Manager, overseeing all software support within the business. I also used my established good working relationships with our clients to upsell more of our products.Key to this was resolving repeating issues to benefit both the client and our company, which is where my technical skills were particularly valuable.A major part of this role was client-facing at senior levels, reporting back on larger issues directly and working with the client to resolve them.

Q.Bit Systems was a new business start-up of which I was the first employee, delivering business, communication and integration solutions to the motor trade. We grew quickly in five-and-a-half years I worked there, during which I was involved with everything from design and production of our software to pitching for business, training and other aspects of client management.My primary role was software developer. I helped design and produce the company's first intranet-based call centre system which is still in use today. I also developed a multi-interfacing application which submitted over £100m-worth of vehicle finance to different brokers.I also used to work on-site directly with our clients developing and fixing software. The largest of these included Mercedes-Benz Direct (plus their Retail division), Camden Motors and Carland (now CarCraft), where we produced a company-wide CRM system called Drive that managed all their customers and automated invoicing via Sage.

Hnd, Computing With Business

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