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paula thorton followes the life of IA from beginning to present... you get to write the next chapter....
The end result will be that when the economy does become prosperous enough to afford such so-called luxuries, or the problems reach the critical mass needed to recreate/hire for these positions, the work involved in repairing the systems will be enormous. I expect that at my next job I'll have to go in with a backhoe to straighten out the network and fix what "Tom down the hall who's good with computers" did while they struggled without the "luxury" of a network engineer.
Not to say that there isn't a need for specialization; there's certainly projects complex enough to benefit from it, but i doubt we're gonna see much call for "high-level conceptual 12-point buck customer experience architect and meta-data filtering shoehorn" any time soon.
I agree with Mike that IAs in this market definitely need to be more than pure conceptual designers, not just because job listings these days tend to ask for that sort of thing (IA/UI designer, for example, or a GUI specialist who can also program VB). To have someone that understands interface technology and OO design concepts strengthens the offering of any company that they work for, and (I think) improves their IA work.