The first step was a comprehensive strategy-mapping exercise to understand where the business was trying to go and how technology could help, according to Tony Bishop. "The five-month mapping process included business, operations, and technology people ... who really understood the day in the life of the investment banker," Bishop recalls.

For each business and product line, Bishop says, the team mapped the systems supporting the value chain and then asked, "Where do you gain competitive advantage by being able to build horizontal systems and services?"

Based on the three-to-five year business road map, the technology team then began mapping pieces of the business itself to different services, the infrastructure that would be required to run those services, and the accompanying SLAs. "Then we further mapped it down to components ... both business functions like a pricing engine and infrastructure functions like an app server," Bishop adds. "We mapped the dependencies and the reuses across hundreds of systems."

The end result, Bishop explains, was a detailed road map for building components and services, plus a set of standard designs and best practices for future development based on the core platform.

A multilayered approach