New technology does not mean the old technology is going away. Technology has a purpose, and only goes away when its utility goes away.

I read somewhere that there are more horses in the US now than there were a hundred years ago, so the automobile never quite eliminated horses.

Even punched cards are still in use in some applications, and many file formats standards are still in use that were based on punched cards, with the 80 column format still alive in terminals and the default column width for the Windows command shell.

Nine track reel to reel tapes did finally go away, but production did not end until 2001 and the last drive was shipped in 2003. However, newer forms of tapes and drives are still widely used for backups.

I have a friend with a small non-technology business, and he has two employees out of twenty who are dedicated to IT. He didn’t plan to have an IT department that was 10% of his workforce, but it happened and he feels he needs them.

So the death of IT departments may not be as imminent at the predictions. They will disappear only when they no longer have any value.