Stepper: I'd say the environment was in place at the end of last year. It wasn't ready for prime time, although there were one or two early adopters. It was in the first quarter of this year that Hermann [Lamberti] reiterated, from the top, how important this was. That pretty much aligned everyone to make sure that they were engaged in making this move to a service-oriented enterprise happen.

That was a watershed moment in many ways. It was no longer people waiting to see if it would work. We were no longer asking, 'Could we?' but were asking, 'Why wouldn't we?' Hermann's interest got everyone, both on the infrastructure side and on the app/dev side, to lay out what the demand would be over the course of a year. And it was easier than any other infrastructure project to get the right resources behind it, to flesh it out. So, the building out has been going on over the course of '08. We have a number of significant projects on it now. It's not perfect, but we've got the people lined up, and we're very confident in the platform that we have.

CIO: So you're affecting culture change by having a top-down push, putting core platform components in place first to eliminate debate, targeting shared infrastructure as your entry point, and then establishing SOA as a clear direction for the organization. But once that's done, what are the next steps? You now have over 100 service-oriented applications in various stage of development. How did you select them? How have you affected culture change among the application developers, specifically? What type of training has been required? What have you looked at in terms of getting everybody up to speed? I imagine the bank has myriad skill sets among the developers, and yet now everybody has to converge around this common approach.

Stepper: We did a number of things. At the end of the first quarter, we did something that's not too common for Deutsche Bank, which is, we created some cross-bank governance structures for our SOA program. Most people will hear the word 'governance' and tune out. But this was a group making sure that a group of people across the bank were able to pick up the early work of the infrastructure, and expend that to training and communications for the flagship project to the service development.

What we didn't want to do is just turn all the activity onto SOA and create spaghetti; to let 1,000 flowers bloom into something that, in the end, doesn't really add up to much. What the governance structures did was to build on the work we did on the infrastructure side, and advance it when it comes to things like naming standards. All of the engineering decisions that have to be made-which can make all the difference in how these things are used and operate. To extend that to communications, we had the same governance structure set up. We rolled these programs out to touch the development community in small groups. We made sure they were aware of what was going on, that we listened to the problems that were affecting them, and that we would determine what would make a difference for them.