Heading the list of revolutionary changes will be the creation of what SAP board member Shai Agassi calls the "chief process innovation officer." But that's only the beginning of Agassi's SOA vision. Agassi sees a whole list of new job titles coming out of the SOA revolution, such as "repository keepers," "composers," and "disruptive innovators."

Agassi is definitely onto something. The marriage of IT and business in the process-driven world of service architectures and model-based development will require a lot more than just programmers, systems analysts, and software engineers. The good news is that there will still be a definitive need for a chief information officer. The bad news is that as SOAs proliferate, CIOs who remain merely CIOs will see their significance diminish significantly over time.

In the short term, SOAs should herald another era of empowerment for CIOs. Adopting an SOA and moving the application development paradigm from programming to business process "assembly"—instead of writing code, Agassi's composers will assemble new applications by stringing well-defined processes together into composite applications—will require a significant architecture shift for most companies. And architecture shifts require CIOs.

In addition to implementing an SOA, enterprises will need to encapsulate their existing software processes and make them available as enterprise services by placing them in process repositories, where Agassi's "repository keepers" will manage them, keep them up to date, and otherwise ensure that they work well in a distributed service architecture. There's going to be a lot of business process engineering, software rationalization, and rethinking of how IT is used to support business processes. More work for the traditional CIO.

In the long term, however, as these initial efforts become standard operating procedure, pressure to change the role of the CIO will begin. That's where the concept of the "chief process innovation officer" comes in: When the building blocks of business change are no longer as much about technology as they are about business process, "information technology" will cease to be as important as "process innovation." That's because the competitive edge of a business will be defined more by what "disruptive innovators" can do with process innovation than what programmers and software developers can do with traditional IT.

Does this mean that CIOs will be sent out to pasture, replaced by a panoply of people with new job titles? Only if CIOs don't make the transition themselves. It won't necessarily be easy, but it's definitely the only way to stay ahead of the curve. Being there as a true revolution comes to fruition ought to be reward enough, but for those in need of more-mundane rewards, job security in a notoriously insecure profession might be a good reason too.

Feedback question: Tell us how your role as CIO is changing with SOAs.

Josh Greenbaum, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting, has 20 years of experience in the industry as a computer programmer, systems analyst, author, and consultant. His column appears monthly.