Plenty of businesses make an initial toe-dip into event streaming to solve for a particular task that requires moving large amounts of data around. This sort of bottom-up, or developer- led, entree is a typical start to the adoption journey of event streaming. But if the platform never reaches the sight line of company leadership, it may be blocked from reaching its full potential—and the organization may not truly capitalize on data, or event streaming, to transform.

There’s profound strategic potential in an event streaming platform for enterprise businesses of many kinds. The types of business challenges’ event streaming is capable of addressing include driving better customer experience, reducing costs, mitigating risk, and providing a single source of truth across the business. It can be a game changer.

Here are the five crucial steps to turning event streaming into a business driver and digital transformer.