Streaming & Eventing for Top Management - How to convince decision makers to go on an architectural transformation journey with streaming and Eventing
Abstract
Secure C-suite commitment for the eventing and streaming transformation by showing them the benefits for them.
Eventing and streaming are easy to sell to developers and architects—decoupling systems and running faster experiments is great. These matter to developers, architects, and product owners, but not to the C-suite. Executives focus on growth, resilience, and ROI. Without bridging this gap, streaming remains “just another IT tool.”
This talk shares practical strategies from our transformation journey at Allianz Germany, showing how to get executives to join the journey and turn eventing and streaming into a strategic enterprise capability.
This talk was held at Big Data Conference Europe 2025 on November 19-21, 2025 in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Recording
Key Takeaways
Prove Value Step by Step
Eventing and streaming is easy to sell to developers and architects. Decoupling systems, running faster experiments is great. These matter to developers, architects and product owners, but not to the C-suite.
Executives focus on growth, resilience, and ROI. Without bridging this gap, streaming remains “just another IT tool.”
Strategies tend to fall into one direction: chasing business wins that build fragile architectures, or engineering perfection without visible impact. The goal should be to go the path of managed evolution. Projects must deliver a path between business value and architecture value to get business value and stronger architecture in a good balance. Step by step, this builds credibility and avoids dead ends.
Overcome the Context Barrier
The first task is to reframe the story. Position eventing and streaming as transformation to drive to a future-proof business, with customer impact and competitiveness. Every conversation with top management should start with outcomes and benefits for their business, not the technical implementation.
First, you need to find which benefits the transformation brings to the business. These can be represented in the Temple of Benefits.
With this framework, each stakeholder in the C-suite should be addressed with the key benefits that eventing and streaming can bring to them. Each stakeholder should be addressed with no more than three concrete points on how the transformation towards eventing and streaming helps with their goals. For example, these benefits can drive AI use cases, data products, and hyper-personalization.
Build the Backbone for Scale
Streaming and eventing are more than integration technology — they are the foundation of a future-proof enterprise.
Success requires maturity across four levers:
- Organization: Bring business, IT, and architects together. Eventing and streaming use cases can only be implemented correctly and bring the right business value if IT and business are at the same table. Workshops including all members helped us most.
- Process: Apply structured approaches to enable many teams to prioritize, govern and have a reproducible approach. This helps with credibility as other teams see that they can do the same.
- Method: Use a proven methodology like Domain-Driven Design (DDD) to keep solutions aligned with the business and know how systems and APIs should be cut.
- Technology: Provide a central eventing service that lowers entry barriers for new teams and allows the events to flow between teams. Show Proof of Concepts (PoCs) in the enterprise environment and govern the architecture with blueprints and guidelines.
Links
Related Talks
- Streaming & Eventing for Top Management (Data Streaming World Tour Vienna) - The original version of this talk
- From Traditional to Real-Time: How We Transform Allianz with Eventing - Our presentation at inscom 2025 about the transformation journey
- Eventing@Allianz Germany - An architectural transformation journey - Our earlier presentation at Confluent Data in Motion Tour 2024
