Rabobank: Building Digital Agility at Scale

Abstract

Progress was being made, but Rabobank needed to move faster to match the levels of service and convenience provided by digital native companies like Uber, Netflix and Amazon that were fast becoming the reference points for the industry. Leurs, chief digital transformation officer and a member of the Executive Board, had hired Martens to set up a Digital Hub that was meant to become the cornerstone of the bank's digital implementation plan. The Hub had been successful as a pilot project, but when they had tried to grow the Hub's operations, problems began to surface. For example, they faced challenges attracting and retaining colleagues from the rest of the bank. The bank's main operating units had been happy to support the Hub when it was a small entity located in the head office but seemed less interested when they had to provide people and resources for the Hub's projects. As the number and range of projects increased, their complexity also began to rise. In particular, the shift from DevOps, or projects largely focused on IT development, to BizDevOps, which focused on end-to-end customer journeys, created a number of challenges. It was necessary to overcome these problems to achieve the scale and speed of transformation required to compete effectively with traditional and emerging rivals. Rabobank's board was looking for answers. Leurs and Martens were scheduled to make a proposal to Rabobank' management team on how to move forward with the company's digital transformation. They needed to convince the board and the rest of the bank that now was the moment to take the leap forward. How could they address the tensions in the current organization? Would the lessons already learned be enough to face the coming challenges? Were they ready to move from IT DevOps to full BizDevOps? Did they have a choice?