It's clear to me there are only two paths. One path is to take every repetitive, by-the-book task in your organization and outsource it or mechanized it. The other path is to take every repetitive, by-the-book task in your organization and give the people who do that task the freedom, the incentive, and yes, the imperative to do something that cannot be outsourced.
Either what you're doing is repetitive, in which case you ought to outsource it, or it's homemade, insightful, and filled with initiative and judgement, in which case you can charge for it.
Too often, managers try to have it both ways, and end up with clever, skilled people who move on due to boredom, or "idiots" who can't do the job. Their failure to make a strategic choice ends up in a bad personnel result.
Similarly, software development -- including app support -- should be thought of similarly. Programmers, almost by definition, should not be doing something twice. Give the clever, skilled ones the freedom to minimize the mundane and repetitive. And if you still have a lot of it around, you've probably kept the wrong ones.
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