There's a major problem with the media and public misperception that all IT is the same. Information Systems is such a niche-oriented field, you have to look at the areas of specialization instead of the field as a whole.
Step one, move out of major metro tech centers where the impact has been much greater. Become a bigger fish in a much smaller pond.
When you examine the backgrounds of a lot of the unemployed IT workers, you will find the lion's share are hardware, network, switching, wiring, sys admin types. This market is indeed dead - but it's not the death of the .com bubble that caused it. There was a huge geographic turf war underway at the same time between ISPs & telcos to put IP services in place. Once the geography was pretty saturated, the consolidations started. Now, in 2003, the ISP/bandwidth wars are over and the related companies will never need the same level of excess staff to keep up.
The problem with a lot of engineering types is that many of them shun anything related to marketing (actually, they believe marketing is the enemy). This clouded their ability to forsee the endgame and plan accordingly. Consequently, you have a glut of network folks in the gutter who will continue to struggle.
However, there have been and are many niches of Information Services that have remained stable and continued to grow in demand.
Software architecture/product engineering - that's mostly what I do. This is sort of the pinnacle of all IT functions from an operational view because it requires competency in all IT areas: network, hardware, software, OS, database, code, etc... I spend most of my development time using development tools like Rational Rose, to churn out Unified Modeling use case scenarios. Then I take those models and break down the code object development requirements and slot them into a project management Gantt Chart/calendar for the dungeonmasters to use to make the trench coder's lives miserable.
Risk Management/Quality Control - with budgets being constricted, there isn't enough money to complete projects, let alone screw them up. Risk Management/QC has continued to be in high demand.
Security - high-end security has continued to be a hotbed of business. Biometrics, encryption/decryption, etc... have all been on the table - particularly in relation to the war on terrorism and homeland defense initiatives.
Wireless - migration from the copper & fiber that was just put in a couple of years ago is an area of interest to a lot of companies. Public sector will start to be driven more and more by the 800MHz standard.
Database Architecture/Admin - Technologies like XML and web services have created new opportunities to re-engineer many legacy data environments. The demand is very high for stron DBAs, particularly Oracle certified. Additionally, open source DB engines are getting very hot as companies seek out ways to reduce their internal operating costs. mySQL, postgre, SAPDB, etc... will all be very important technology camps in the near future.
J2EE & .NET - Java developers have remained in high demand. More wireless devices, PDAs, etc... have all kept the market hot. When you follow and understand the iteration of platform version releases, you can forecast the need for developers as companies migrate their code. ASP has been a Microsoft camp staple since 1997, but companies are starting to finally accept and explore .NET and web services (now that SP1 is out).
Public Sector - over 1/2 of all public sector IT workers are slated to retire within the next 10 years. In the meantime, outsourcing is hot and will continue to be strong in the public sector as they realize they cannot attract and retain the people and skills they need to continue to just get current, let alone advance.
In summary, IT people who are out of work need to think through their experiences and try to define tertiery paths relating to their industry exposure in the past. Maybe you won't find a network admin or engineering spot for a healthcare company, but you can take your healthcare experience and start learning to program or learn HIPAA security issues, etc... to find work.
As a side note, I read Peter Coffee's article last week about the rebirth of COBOL in the next 5 years. Apparently, 13% (up from 8% 3 years ago) of all new software being developed today is written in COBOL (WHO'DA THUNK IT?!?!?!?!?!), however, COBOL programmers are retiring and dying at a rate of 15% annually. This means there will be a shortage of internet savvy developers who know COBOL to maintain and write new code for these platforms in the next 5 years. There's hope for some of you dinosaurs yet... [;)]
Keep up the fight and don't quit.