The surprising answer, supported strongly by her CEO: Rock the boat, change everything, and build a multihundred million dollar, end-to-end, services-oriented development and delivery platform, backed by a business-focused, product management culture in IT.

While many enterprises nibble at the edges of SOA, Wachovia's CIB division opted for a ubiquitous services architecture to support the innovation and efficiency it needed to catch competitors.

"This was a great opportunity for Wachovia," Certoma says. "This is a very large business growing rapidly, but with not so much entrenched legacy that you couldn't take a vision and platform to a whole new level."

To help realize that vision, Certoma hired Tony Bishop as senior vice president and director of product management. Bishop already learned a lot building SOA platforms for financial services. "IT needs to be flexible, adaptable, scalable," Bishop observes. "It can't just be about modeling my business processes as a system. It has to be holistic."

Eyeing the prize