Lesson learned: Time and travel equal money.

The quality quandary

The quality of code is another sticking point. Jones, who uses offshore developers for special projects to supplement his own internal IT department, says code produced offshore doesn't necessarily meet domestic standards.

"There is a difference between people who can code and people who can write production code," says Jones, explaining that someone writing code for a production application should be able to ensure that the code has the ability to "fail gracefully" when it runs into trouble.

To address that issue, Jones has learned to put together detailed coding specifications for vendors, along with rigorous acceptance criteria for the code that's produced.