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 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.