Ken Olisa OBE

About

Ken Olisa OBE

Ken is Founder and Chairman of Restoration Partners, the boutique technology merchant bank and architects of the Virtual Technology Cluster model. Ken’s technology career spans over 30 years commencing with IBM from whom he won a scholarship while at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. In 1992, after twelve years as a senior executive at Wang Labs in the US and Europe, Ken founded Interregnum, the technology merchant bank. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2006.

He is currently a director of Thomson Reuters and Deputy Chairman of The Institute of Directors.

Ken is a Freeman of the City of London, Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, Patron of Thames Reach (for which he received an OBE in 2010), Chairman of Shaw Trust, was an original member of Independent Parliamentary Standard Authority, and is the Founder and Chairman of the Powerlist Foundation. He is a past Sunday Times Not for Profit Non-Executive Director of the year, and was named Number 1 in the 2016 Powerlist’s most influential British black person. In 2013 Ken and his wife, Julia, endowed the Olisa Library at his alma mater Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

In 2015, Her Majesty the Queen appointed Ken as Her Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant for Greater London.