We've partnered closely with TIBCO, but also with 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.

CIO: Why did adding that enterprise service bus and other technological pieces in place make it easier for you to embark upon these first 100 projects?

Stepper: Sometimes those first few steps are the hardest. Instead of spending an inordinate amount of time debating tools and techniques, we got past that within a relatively short amount of time with TIBCO and IBM.

When we're talking to applications, there's something for [developers] to actually use; something that works, something that's already production grade, something that's already set up as the utility. So the first 10 projects didn't have to go through the nightmare of on-boarding, and we don't have endless debates about what toolset to use. We had some of the best SOA engineers work that out early. So, instead of building it as they came, they anticipated the demand, built it out in a pretty quick timeframe, and it ended up being production grade. That was a great call. Now, when we approach applications, it's easier to onboard them, it's easier to get [developers] trained, it's ready to be workflow- or Web-service-enabled, and so on.

CIO: And about when did you do this? And how did you determine that it was, in fact, production grade, when there really wasn't a production-grade SOA in place to throw these things against, and do that kind of performance testing?