CIO: What was the need to share information assets across business lines? If that was a challenge, clearly they were getting away without having to do that. What was driving more pressure to start doing that?

Stepper: Success, really. First, we've grown to such a point that now we have different problems. We have problems of being able to scale, to accommodate the growth we've achieved, and [accommodate] the growth we expect to achieve, and cost.

So there's an absence of streamlined efficient operations. You have to have [more and more] people, and that's just not a sustainable model. When our focus was on growth, it was actually an excellent strategy. Now that we've achieved some of the business goals, [the] focus [is] on cost management and scalability. And clearly the cycles—whether it be in credits, revenues, or whether it be in any of the one-time margin products—the cycle of margin is decreasing, going from innovative to commoditized. And that cycle seems to be increasingly shorter. And so there's a recognition that, while we'll always be looking to create new financial instruments and new higher-margin products, that we're going to have to be much, much better at institutionalizing the processing of those.

CIO: So when would you say the institutionalization of that information sharing, that integration started to happen and tell us about your decision-making process that led you to where you are today. What was on the table? What approaches were you considering?

Stepper: This shift is something that senior managers who had IT operations across Deutsche Bank have seen for some time. But in a bank as large as ours, it takes time for that to be relevant to the thousands of applications and thousands of human beings who work in IT operations. In terms of other approaches or why we're looking at becoming a service-oriented enterprise, and using SOA specifically within IT, certainly we've adopted other approaches as well.

We've entered into a number of strategic partnerships, both with internal entities but also external, to move all the work off-shore, both within IT and operations. We've definitely been a leader in moving processing and moving work off-shore. And it's just that, at the same time, we haven't waited to create the shared assets, and to streamline all of our processes before doing that. We've kind of done them in parallel.

And I think for a number of people, that's somewhat heretical thinking. They'll say you should re-engineer what you're doing first, and then move it off-shore, or you should have all of your things fine-tuned beforehand. I'm one of those people who would say that. But having seen what Deutsche Bank has done, I think we've accrued very real benefit and some very valuable experience in being able to work with people globally, and I think that puts us in a better position to re-engineer our workflows. It's not a textbook way of doing it, but I think it's accrued real benefits now, and I think it's a good way to do it in the future.

CIO: The textbook way of doing it works if you're a textbook case.

Stepper: [laughs] That's right. That's exactly right.

CIO: So let's talk about the real case here, what are some of the shared assets that you initially targeted and tell us a little bit about your journey into SOA. What was the decision-making process that led you there, what approach did you decide to take, you're working with some developers internally as well as externally off-shore. Take us back to, I guess, the moment where SOA became something that was on the radar and you knew that this was the way you had to go and then, of course, once you do that, there's crucial decisions that have to be made because there's so many options there.

Stepper: Right. So first I give the impetus to service orientation actually came from a board member, Hermann-Josef Lamberti. He ran IT operations for the bank. He's also the Group COO of Deutsche Bank AG. He was the one to stand up and say 'This is something we have to do.' At the time most people really weren't sure what he meant. But over the past month, we've fleshed out the vision he had.

The initial focus is on things that everyone can relate to; largely infrastructure utilities. So whether it's hosting environments, whether it's an enterprise service bus and workflow engine, whether it's other common mechanisms—single sign-on mechanisms and such that are basic shared assets we could embrace across the different businesses—I think that was a good way to gain traction towards creating high-level shared artifacts.

And so the first few steps to being a service-oriented enterprise and using SOA actually wasn't SOA at all, but a pre-SOA agenda of being able to create infrastructure utilities that could be shared across the bank. The next wave was introducing a proper SOA infrastructure.

We've partnered closely with TIBCO, but also with IBM and a few other folks, to create a global enterprise service bus and workflow infrastructure. With that in place, it's easier now to go through the application portfolio, start to expose content as Web services, and start to introduce workflow to places where it was foreign before. That's the spot we're in right now. We've got on the order of 100 small to large projects in flight, all in relation to the projects across the bank. There are a handful of large flagship initiatives that can show the power of being service oriented whether that's about instrument data, account opening, derivatives, transaction processing front to back. There are a number of large flagships, but also, again, 100 projects of varying size that are making SOA both relevant to a broader set of people and also educating broader chunks of the group at the same time.