How China Agricultural Bank’s DevOps Journey Fuels Digital Transformation

To improve enterprise IT governance and promote industry experience sharing, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology hosted the “2020 GOLF+ IT New Governance Leadership Forum” in Beijing on December 23, 2020, with support from the China Communications Standards Association, China Internet Association, and the Cloud Computing Standards and Open‑Source Promotion Committee.

The forum invited leaders from the Academy, the Standards Association, the Internet Association, and various IT experts. As a highlight, the forum announced the 2020 Industry Leading Enterprise awards, naming China Agricultural Bank (ABC) as the leading financial enterprise of the year.

Q1: Please introduce yourself and your enterprise

Zhao Yundong: China Agricultural Bank is a major comprehensive financial service provider in China. After more than 40 years of development, it has become a modern state‑owned joint‑stock commercial bank group with solid market foundations, strong capital, stable operations, and comprehensive functions. To align with the digital era, the bank launched a bank‑wide “Digital Transformation – Re‑building an Agricultural Bank” strategy in early 2019, focusing on internetization, data‑driven, intelligence, and openness, aiming to create a smart bank with excellent customer experience and a leading digital ecosystem for inclusive agriculture. The bank’s DevOps journey began simultaneously to integrate R&D and operations.

Q2: What standout IT projects and highlights did you achieve in 2020?

Zhao Yundong: Since April 2019, ABC started a DevOps construction project to meet rapid market demand and business innovation. By restructuring product‑innovation processes, integrating organizational structures, upgrading technical architecture, and optimizing management mechanisms, the bank embedded key DevOps concepts—small‑batch delivery, full‑stack teams, and deployment pipelines—into continuous value delivery. Five major streams (tool integration, process optimization, standardization, data visualization, and pilot evaluation) drove DevOps capability building and a dual‑mode R&D system. After more than a year, the bank achieved one‑stop, traceable, automated R&D‑operations from requirement intake to version release, shortening delivery cycles to as fast as eight days, with unit‑test coverage over 80% and 100% automated interface coverage. In June, the first five projects passed the third‑level DevOps continuous delivery assessment; a sixth project did so in November, marking ABC’s DevOps capability as a domestic leader.

Q3: What major challenges did you face in 2020 and how did you overcome them?

Zhao Yundong: 2020 was both challenging and full of opportunities. Implementing DevOps involved several difficulties: (1) Cross‑department coordination across two centers and nearly 20 departments; (2) Localizing toolchains required extensive customization and high costs; (3) Building a measurement system from scratch to satisfy both enterprise management and assessment needs; (4) Breaking through strict internal regulations, as DevOps promotes standardization and automation that conflict with existing procedures; (5) The COVID‑19 pandemic increased remote‑work communication costs. The bank overcame these by holding multiple专题 meetings, fostering collaboration among key personnel, and conducting targeted problem‑solving sessions.

Q4: What are your IT practice plans for 2021?

Zhao Yundong: DevOps remains a priority in 2021. ABC will continue to consolidate best practices, identify improvement points, and deepen research to expand DevOps application scope. The bank is strengthening DevOps foundations, promoting its capabilities across projects, and accelerating lean R&D center operations to boost IT productivity. A phased rollout will be carried out according to system technology stacks and maturity, establishing an internal DevOps coach team to support adoption, thereby driving digital transformation, agile practice, and integrated R&D‑operations.