Just look at all the commercials with the theme "you don't need IT guys."
You won't need as many IT Operations guys.
There are many data center locations in IBM and other major companies that are entered by no humans, unless a machine burps.
I remember the days of large shops with eight or ten operators: one at the system console, three or four changing tapes, another two changing removeable disk drives, and another who did nothing but attend to the system printer.
Those "You don't need IT guys" commercials are for small businesses that can't otherwise afford IT, or have no room for a datacenter. They take on the datacenter operations for the small company. However, they (the datacenter people) need IT too, to run their huge shops. Granted, not as many as if every company had their own IT, but still more than the 50% reduction talked about here.
IT is disliked in most organizations (including my own - I get criticism, too) largely due to poor customer service and a failure in most cases to align IT spending priorities with business goals. A company begins to do poorly, and IT becomes a convenient scapegoat.
Over time, IT is simply going to be absorbed back into the business units that use it. An "IT Department" will become as anachronistic as the "Typing Pool" would be today. Business people with IT fluency will get bigger raises, and command more money. This process is already happening, and is driving the outsourcing of IT functions that are deemed to be, in the eyes of management, akin to building maintenance. The "utility" aspect of it will be outsourced everywhere, just as companies no longer have janitors on staff. The "information management" aspect, already a business-oriented funtion, will become more so.
None of this necessarily means an apocalypse for American IT workers, but those who have a business background and the ability to communicate at a high level will do much, much better than those who don't, regardless of any technical brilliance the latter group may posess.
My company outsourced a lot of our operations jobs to Brazil and the support is TERRIBLE! They're friendly enough but have to be told how to do everything over and over. This is after they've had the account for three years. Sometimes they won't even talk to us on the phone they only want to communicate through emails, so a problem that took 10 minutes before now takes hours. The management won't even talk about the problems because it would make them look like idiots.