Yes...certainly the commoditization of IT equipment and its use in nearly every job function will lead to decreased dependance on IT departments (?). I've been

Yes...certainly the commoditization of IT equipment and its use in nearly every job function will lead to decreased dependance on IT departments (?). I've been more or less involved in medium-sized IT shops my whole carrer, and while it's true that some roles have been removed, many persist (and new ones just keep coming). Processes management and security never die, nor should they. Groups of people above a certain size need someone who is designated to make sure they work efficiently and effectively with technology. Someone has to know that app is out there before you can use it, and somebody needs to know how it works, what the terms are, and how to back it up before you put all of your confidential company data on it. Hardware and configuration management will probably die with the PC (I hope), but I think that may be more than 5 years out for most businesses. Trainings work. Even glossy, easy-to-use software can benefit if someone knows the use case and shares the possibilities with the users (surprisingly, not everyone knows they can share a link to a dropbox file). Managing services is a lot more than just managing servers. Outsourcing stuff (gmail, salesforce, whatever) or running it yourself (exchange) have both made the lives of sysadmins a lot easier recently, but the config and integration work just keeps growing. It makes sense because the more options exist, the more work there is. Not to mention that while we can do so much more with all of these new toys than we could 5 years ago, your average user is still spending about the same amount of time searching for it, signing up, getting it, learning it, and googling when he can't figure out why it's not doing the thing it needs to do.