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As a result of IT outsourcing and offshoring, IT professionals and educators are faced with the following question: What SE & KE skill sets will make a software engineer or a knowledge engineer immune to the impact of outsourcing and offshoring? This article summarizes the position papers from a panel held during the 2006 International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering from July 5 to 7 at the Hotel Sofitel, Redwood City in California, USA. Bringing software and knowledge engineers closer to the needs of their prospective customers and providing more value than simply pure software development and maintenance, is an open challenge at least for traditional computer science and software engineering curricula.

The outsourcing market has been growing in recent years and it is expected to keep doing so in the coming years, but this growth has been limited by the failure of many projects that, in some cases, has led organizations to take back those services (insourcing). These failures have been due mainly to problems with providers: lack of experience and capacity to take on the projects, and difficulties of communication. There are good practices frameworks for managing outsourcing projects for clients, but it is not the same for providers, who base the provision of services on their past experience and technical capabilities. The aim of this paper is to state the need of proposing a methodology that guides providers throughout the whole outsourcing life cycle and facilitates the provision of quality services and their management.