It seems that every five or ten years some wag starts prognosticating that IT departments will be dead in another five or ten years. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I would only add that way back in the dark ages you had to have a centralized IT if for no other reasons than the "geeks/nerds" were pretty much the only ones who understood the stuff. Now it's all but impossible for any one individual to truly know and understand the myriad technology out there and new stuff is cropping up all the time. Coupled with the fact that business people and the public at large have become more and more tech-savvy, IT is becoming more facilitative in the sense of "how do we get this widget to work in our environment?" Yet, when the shiny new gizmos break or don't work as expected: "Who ya' gonna call?"