The units are using business architects to perform in-depth reviews of processes, the architect said. "They are modernizing their current business processes and restructuring or re-architecting the business first," the architect said.

The organization first turned to outsourcing firms to take on the role, but now the "business lines are cultivating talent that historically have been business analysts."

Dennis Byron, an analyst at IDC, said he expects more IT organizations to add such a position, which IDC calls a process analyst, to oversee the creation of composite applications from services rather than by coding.

"We expect to see a trend where people within sales, human resources and manufacturing departments will become almost like the developers," he said. "They will understand the business process. They will drag and drop flowchart stuff around and automatically change the [process] flows under the covers."

Bhaskar Chakrabarti, principal IT architect at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, said he expects that the emerging IT role, which his company calls an SOA enterprise architect, will team with business architects and process analysts to champion SOA initiatives and guide the organization toward an SOA.