At this stage, travel expenses enter the picture as well. A trip overseas helps CIOs get comfortable with their choice. After all, offshore vendors can send their best and brightest over for a dog and pony show, but checking out the company on its home turf provides more insight. John Dean, the CIO of Steelcase, an office furniture manufacturer, spent several thousand dollars to send one of his IT executives to Intelligroup Asia in Hyderabad, India, for a week before signing on the dotted line.

"You can read everything you want to read and ask for advice as much as you want, but you have to make it a fact-based decision," Dean says. "So it was important to visit India to validate our thinking."

Bottom line: Expect to spend an additional 1 percent to 10 percent on vendor selection and initial travel costs.

The Cost of Transition

The transition period is perhaps the most expensive stage of an offshore endeavor. It takes from three months to a full year to completely hand the work over to an offshore partner. If company executives aren't aware that there will be no savings - but rather significant expenses - during this period, they are in for a nasty surprise.

"You have to bring people to America to learn your applications, and that takes time, particularly if you're doing it with a new vendor for the first time," explains GE Real Estate's Zupnick, who maintains a handful of three-year contracts with offshore vendors, including TCS and smaller vendor LSI OutsourcingOutsourcing. In GE Real Estate's case, the transition time for each vendor was three months at the very least and up to a year in some cases, in addition to the money-draining vendor selection period of several months. Alles zu Outsourcing auf CIO.de