Outsourcing of Strategies in a Knowledge Economy

We live in a Knowledge Economy, well at least that's what Peter Drucker tells us in The Age of Discontinuity. In fact Search as a industry is based on this product which leads me to a question - With the massive growth of outsourcing how does the search industry handle outsourcing in a knowledge economy?

Search is basically a business product within the knowledge economy and we, as search professionals, are knowledge workers meaning that we work with our heads and not with our hands in producing ideas, knowledge, and information. According to Booz & Company (a global management consulting firm) the number of knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) providers has grown 95 percent since 2000. So where does that leave Search? We'll we're outsourcing too, no doubt.

 I understand the need for outsourcing, hell I've done it myself! There's a need but what are we outsourcing and are we outsourcing the right tasks. We talk of transparency in business but I can assure you that our clients aren't aware of some of these business practices. I suppose you can make the argument that as long as the deliverable is bulletproof no worries. That's true but what about understanding the client's goals and objectives and translating that to a strategy or strategies. Do we leave that up to our internal team or does that get outsourced?

Unlike timestamped tasks I believe that strategies cannot be effectively outsourced. I also believe that when it comes to strategies for search campaigns that we, as search professionals and knowledge workers, keep our strategies to ourselves and let the guy overseas execute on them. After all shouldn't the first step in a long term plan be ours?

Thanks to Peter Drucker for the inspiration.