Rabobank Integration Day 2024
Integrations at Rabobank are not just an afterthought. On the contrary, integration is the lifeblood that powers our daily interactions with systems and applications. Recently, it has taken on an even more strategic role in helping enterprises stay agile and responsive to a market that demands innovative and user-centric products.
New technologies are reshaping the IT, e-commerce, and financial sectors, and Rabobank needs to be at the forefront. What better way to promote integrations than by organizing a full day tech event? Read on to see how we did that.
- Ştefan ZăvoianuSenior Product Owner
Why should you organize an internal tech event?
On the 2nd of September 2024, Rabobank hosted its first edition of Integration Day, a full-day tech event focusing on integration platforms used throughout the organization. When you have a large organization, with hundreds or thousands of engineers spread across different departments, they all need different solutions for their applications. For API's as well as operations, it gets exceedingly difficult to find the right technical solutions. Reaching out to all engineers, trying to get them all onboard your platforms is a tantalous challenge.
If you want to promote standardization of platforms, complete integration solutions and reliable services then you need to convince your engineering teams and give them the much-needed confidence that they are looking for. One way of doing that is by getting them all in one room (literally) and giving them a fairly good taste of what integrations and platforms you have to offer.
Does the format of the event matter?
That is a definite yes. When organizing a tech event, you need to know your audience. Actually, that goes for any type of event. You also need to strike a balance between having too much information in your presentations or too little. You do not want your presentations to be heavy on text and information, nor too shallow as people will lose interest quickly. And of course, you need to throw some fun in it as well.
For our Integration Day event, we used a combination of internal keynotes, external guests (for example vendors), engaging polls and even a panel discussion. In the first part of the event, we wanted to have user success stories that highlight our integration platforms. Having a product owner or manager talk about their product (in this case a platform) is really great. However, having actual users present how they utilize said platform, is more powerful. Even more so when the message comes from engineers or developers.
Later in the day we ran some audience polls to get them engaged. That also led to some remarkably interesting questions related to recent technologies. Couple that with bringing vendors (such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, Kong and IBM) in front of engineers and everyone gets to hear first-hand about best practices, real-life use cases and practical applications. A perfect recipe to get engineers and tech people psyched.
In Closing...
Integrations, both in the cloud and on-premises, are vital to the success of any modern IT company. With increasing complexity and a multitude of systems and subsystems, we must remain vigilant and continuously work towards reducing the cognitive load on engineers while improving customer experience and maximizing automation.
Highlighting those aspects to your tech colleagues will go a long way to getting them onboard your platforms or them placing trust in your solutions.
And remember to not treat your integrations as an afterthought!
In case you are curious, below is a short after movie from our Rabobank Integration Day event.