In the places where I've been outsourced, execs already had exactly that. In my own example, I was doing the work of 3 to 5 people (depending). Not bragging, I was just able to do it - I had put in many of the systems and pretty much ran them on autopilot. Most of my time was spent doing break-fix and implanting changes/new systems.
Then, I assume that execs came in and said, "This WBill, we know he's senior, but he's making way, way, WAY too much money. Let's dump him and bring in some flunkies. All of his systems run on autopilot, and he doesn't seem to be working all that hard anyway."
And I'm sure that outsourcing worked, for a period of time, anyway. Just as a plane can pretty much fly itself with minimal pilot input, IT automated jobs will keep running, equipment will stay turned on, and so forth. The execs, I'm sure, spent their large bonuses and congratulated themselves on their high intelligence, good looks, and low golf scores.....Until..... they wanted to make a change, or something broke. Then they discovered WHY they pay IT guys.
Hint: We're not paid for doing the boring, day-to-day stuff that you always see IT guys doing - changing tapes, running scripts, installing PCs. We're paid to handle it when 1/2 of a multi-million dollar SAN goes down, and the vendor says, "Well, how good are your backups?". Or when thieves break in to the corporate HQ and loot every piece of electronic equipment that there is, and the business needs to be up and going the next day.
My personal favorite was handling a virus outbreak at a Fortune 500 company a long, long time ago. I had the easy part - I only had to work a patch into the login script, make it run within the first 17 seconds of login, and ensure that the new scripts and patch were distributed out to all of the company's DCs. My co-workers needed to figure out a way to reboot 12,000 PCs globally - with no centralized management software, and minimal network infrastructure (many of the PCs were in 3rd world countries) - so that the patch would get picked up. And, we needed to do it ASAP, as each PC that was infected would jabber uncontrollably and take its entire local subnet down so that no one on it could work. That problem, in particular, was challenging.
I've told enough war stories, I suppose. My point is that the top guys already HAD exactly what you described, and didn't recognize it. Promoted to the level of their incompetence, I suppose. That, and the outsourcing companies have slick salespeople, and generous kickbacks, I mean perqs. :-)
War stories are good.