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 , 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 . 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.