Arvesta - Enabling Digital Value Through Business-IT Partnership
Arvesta, an international agricultural and retail brand with strong roots in Belgium, operates across multiple business units, including retail, animal nutrition, agricultural services, and greenhouse solutions.
After years of growth, both organically and through acquisitions, the organization faced increasing operational complexity. Different entities used their own processes, systems, and decision models, limiting collaboration and preventing the company from fully realizing synergies across the group.
Mission & Objectives
In 2016, Arvesta launched a transformation program with a clear ambition: to evolve from a decentralized group of companies into a single integrated organization capable of delivering sustainable business value through digitalization.
The mission focused on three strategic objectives. First, aligning business strategy and digital investments to support company-wide value creation rather than local optimization.
Second, establishing a unified way of working between business and IT to enable faster and better-informed investment decisions.
Third, increasing ownership and adoption of digital initiatives to ensure that technology investments translate into measurable operational impact.
Despite significant investments in large-scale system implementations, expected benefits remained limited. Digital programs were delivered successfully from a technical perspective, yet business adoption lagged, and collaboration between business and IT grew increasingly strained.
IT was perceived primarily as a delivery organization, while business stakeholders remained insufficiently involved in prioritizing and owning digital initiatives.
Approach
Together with xplus, Arvesta reassessed its IT operating model and governance structure. The analysis revealed that the core challenge was not the IT Organization's functioning but the absence of shared accountability between business and IT.
To address this, Arvesta introduced enterprise portfolio management as a new operating principle linking strategy, investments, and execution. The organization was structured into business portfolios aligned with strategic domains. For each portfolio, a dedicated leadership trio was established, comprising an executive owner, a business portfolio manager, and an IT value manager.
A portfolio community, comprising the business portfolio managers and IT value managers, was established, with a portfolio officer reporting to the CEO, to facilitate portfolio working.
These portfolio trios embedded in the portfolio community became responsible for translating strategic priorities into investment roadmaps, managing budgets, and ensuring that scarce IT capacity was allocated to initiatives delivering the highest business value. Decision-making moved closer to the business while remaining fully aligned with enterprise strategy.
Crucially, the model was embedded within existing leadership structures. Internal leaders were empowered with clear mandates, supported by executive sponsorship and reinforced through transparent planning and prioritization cycles.
Impact
The transformation fundamentally changed how digital value was created within Arvesta.
Business and IT evolved from a transactional service relationship toward a strategic partnership based on shared ownership and joint accountability. Investment discussions shifted from competing project requests to portfolio-driven prioritization aligned with corporate strategy.
Executive decision-making accelerated significantly, with portfolio recommendations from the portfolio community becoming the primary driver for annual investment planning.
The organization gained clearer visibility on value creation, improved adoption of digital solutions, and stronger alignment between strategic objectives and execution capacity.
Digital initiatives are now owned internally, reducing dependency on external partners and enabling Arvesta to steer its transformation proactively.
Beyond governance improvements, the impact was cultural. Collaboration increased, transparency improved, and leadership engagement around digital initiatives strengthened across the enterprise. IT became an integral contributor to business strategy rather than a downstream implementation function.
Business outcome
By redefining how business and IT collaborate, Arvesta established the organizational conditions required to turn digital investments into sustainable business value — enabling faster strategic execution, better resource allocation, and renewed momentum for its ongoing transformation journey.
