In his new book, Nicholas Carr poses some interesting questions about the way we use technology...
"In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form," Carr writes. "It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people."
We'll see if he is right as time goes by, but feeling is that he is mostly on the right track - as the internet becomes more and more ubiquitous, the services we use most often for business processes will continue to transition across to much lower cost web based services. Google mail is a good example - their web based apps are very reliable, almost completely free, and provide a robust way of doing IT business for most SMBs.