While some dissatisfied clients have jettisoned their offshore agreements, others have hunkered down to learn from their mistakes.

At one point in his career at Cable Scope Inc., Bret Brase worked with Indian outsourcing companies whose sales pitches would include the claim that they were able to do work while their U.S. customers were sleeping. But Brase discovered that following the sun isn't all it's cracked up to be. "The difficulty is that you need to collaborate," and that's a problem when one party is asleep, says Brase, now a partner at the New York-based provider of spot advertising for cable television.

So when Cable Scope decided last year to modernize a 16-year-old automated system that enables its customers to buy and sell media content, it didn't turn to India. Instead, it looked a little closer to home and asked Argentina-based Globant to put together a needs assessment, straighten out the business logic and revamp the system from its IT center in Buenos Aires.

Although Cable Scope has benefited from being only two hours behind Globant's IT workers, Brase and his colleagues still had a rocky road early on. "We weren't nearly as prepared as we should've been to manage these guys, and it's going to cost us time," says Brase. For example, on the front end of the system modernization effort, the Globant team created a set of data prototypes that met Cable Scope's requirements, says Brase. But when the Globant team developed graphical user interface (GUI) screens afterward, the information on the screens didn't meet expectations. So he and other Cable Scope executives had to fly to Argentina for a few weeks to "pound through the communications," he says.

Lesson learned: "We should have asked for detailed mark-ups [of the GUI screens] because a picture is worth a thousand words," says Brase. "Business owners often can't describe what they want until they've seen it."