Rik Farenhorst

There are few professionals who can claim a richer experience leading and growing high-performance teams for highly-renowned organizations than Rik. Via his company Rethink Digital, Rik’s main passion is helping organizations to survive in this digital era, i.e. help them accelerate and improve by smartly leveraging new digital capabilities.

Over the past decade, Rik has created and delivered many trainings on various leading IT trends and paradigms. He has coached many experts, leaders, teams, and organizations on their digital transformation journeys. As CIO of Transavia he was responsible for the IT department (250fte) and innovation portfolio and was leading the organizational and digital transformation of this innovative, low-cost airline. Earlier, as a business unit manager at Xebia he helped many large organizations to accelerate and improve by smartly leveraging new digital capabilities. During these years, during which he also helped bootstrap various startups (e.g. Instruqt), he became one of the leading figures in the fast-evolving world of DevOps.

In 2016 Rik was one of the founding fathers of DASA by creating its competence framework and defining the DASA DevOps principles. He is also one of the master trainers of DASA’s DevOps Fundamentals course. Since 2018, as chairman of DASA’s Enterprise Leadership Forum, Rik focuses on inspiring executive leadership peers and professionals on a global scale and facilitates the sharing of good practices and experiences, and learning from stories from the trenches.