CIO: Are you able to say what third parties you're working with?

Stepper: We started with the vendors we have, meaning IBM. But we found that the canned training only goes so far. We're trying to strike a balance between 'what are the service-oriented architecture skill sets we need' with 'How can we apply [these skills] at Deutsche Bank?' That means taking things like instrument data examples, application library examples, our particular implementation of enterprise service bus, etc., and make them as real as possible, so that when people need the training, they can actually do something as opposed to just going to the more generic vendor offering. It's been tough to strike that balance, but we're certainly working on it.

CIO: You have, again, over 100 projects in play, and a couple of those are flagship products for the bank. So clearly you're building. What decisions have you made in terms of languages, interoperability, standards? For argument's sake, as I speak to organizations that are doing SOA, some have chosen to use SOAP, some are going with REST, some aren't using either. Some are using their own custom XML payloads. What's your approach to how these applications actually touch each other? How are they talking?

Stepper: For the most part, we've gone the SOAP route, but I'd say we're not nearly done identifying and promoting specific standards. The governance body that I mentioned was formed in the first quarter? There are two of them. One is a SOA standards board, and that's exactly the kinds of things that they're incrementally defining, rolling out, and promoting in terms of standards. The 100 projects I mentioned are the projects that, over the course of the next 12-plus months, we expect to onboard to our SOA infrastructure. And based on the 20 or so that we have live right now, we're able to get real-world examples, extract what we think are meaningful standards, and then promote them in time for the remainder of the next 12 months.

So the answer to your question is, it's a work in progress. We have the people in place, and we think the timing is right, to do it in an academic way, but in a way that is relevant to the live applications that are coming onboard over the next 12 months.

CIO: What are some insights you've gained that you didn't anticipate, now that those first 20 applications are actually live? Any surprises? Any challenges? Any brick walls that you ran into?

Stepper: As much as I said we think we did a great job trying to get the infrastructure to production grade early on in the overall SOA timeline, in retrospect, I would have done that even earlier. I would have formed those governance structures even earlier, too, because I think we—and I think this is probably true in most organizations—I think we underestimated how large a transformation this could be; that is, going from vertically-aligned IT operations environment to something that's trying to make much greater use of shared assets.

It's not just about teaching developers how to use Web services. It's changing how the funding is done for shared services. It's putting governance structures in place. It's defining engineering and process standards. It's creating new roles where you have actual process analysts; roles that just don't exist today. I'm glad we have things that are live, because nothing beats having real projects out there that you've learned from as an organization. But I'd still look to put more weight, more resources, behind the early engineering of the infrastructure, and between the early decisions around process and engineering standards. I would do that a lot earlier than I did.

CIO: About how much earlier if you had it all to do over again?

Stepper: I would have spent, instead of the first half of this year, I would have done that at least six months earlier.

CIO: How large is the pool of enterprise application developers working on these projects now?

Stepper: That's an excellent question. So, across Deutsche Bank we have thousands of people just for the investment bank, and if you add in all of the key personnel at DB, it should certainly eclipse 10,000 people.

They're not all working on SOA projects per se, but the way we use SOA and why it's a big deal for us is, it's not a narrow definition. It's purposefully a broad definition of what a service is, what a reusable asset is, and by all means we use the traditional SOA tools and infrastructure to connect things. But as we talk about it across DB, it's much more about how to do things once and do them right, and not limit that to a narrow technical interpretation.