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Instead, IT departments will be populated with "versatilists" -- those with a technology background who also know the business sector inside and out, can architect and carry out IT plans that will add business value, and can cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.

This is true, but those "versatilists" will not exist within IT Departments - they will work directly for the business units that need the services. The IT Department will be the smallish team of server/network engineers who maintain the physical infrastructure - and in many cases, those functions will be outsourced to an IT services firm.

Systems analysis/design/programming will be absorbed back into the business disciplines that use it. It is already becoming another required piece of a well-rounded business professional's skill set, like managing people and business communications. Companies don't have time to wait on three-year, fully planned and specified implementations by IT Departments - they are relying on agile development of quick, tactical, 80% solutions using development tools that are friendly to business analysts and managers. If they need something bigger, they buy it from a vendor and integrate it, often using vendor consultants rather than in-house IT staff. The day of big, internal development projects is rapidly drawing to a close.

That's why we see the well-publicized disconnect between so many unemployed/underemployed IT people and industry's insistence that they can't find any qualified people: the "technologists" can't find jobs and companies can't find the "versatilists".

If they need something bigger, they buy it from a vendor and integrate it,

I work for one of those 'vendors'. We do the same thing, doing less in-house fully staffed proprietary development, and doing more Open Source work cooperatively developed across all the vendors of a particular technology, including in particular our primary competitors.

We still have a few areas of expertise that are proprietary and special to our company, but only those in which we can be in the top two or three companies in the world, and make good money providing something you just can't get elsewhere.

Even for us as a company, most of our revenue comes not from these areas of proprietary expertise, but from working with the customer, in a multiple vendor, global context to provide the complete package of expertise and system expertise needed to meet the customers needs.