For instance, Delphi has contracted with Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) in Mumbai, India, to handle its global SAP development, deployment and support, but the goal wasn't merely to tap into the SAP talent available there for a competitive price. It was also to optimize time-zone advantages, particularly when it came to supporting clients in the Asia-Pacific region.

But the TCS contract does not cover global application development and maintenance. In another strategic move, Delphi has moved away from multiyear agreements with single providers. Instead, like other large companies, it's adopting a more technology-driven sourcing strategy that takes advantage of the core competencies of several providers.

"We can do that more readily than five or six years ago because suppliers are getting the message that we want three or four and we want them to collaborate," McCabe says.

Moreover, there are times when he wouldn't want the outsourcing staff to be physically removed from his onshore client base.

"When you have an application with high-touch requirements, physical presence becomes critical, and in that case we understand the price difference and are willing to pay for that," he says.

If the old offshoring model could be represented as a one-way arrow pointing from the U.S. to a lower-cost overseas location, the new global sourcing model has arrows that form a complex web. In the new model, work can flow from a client in the U.S. to an Indian company that passes along a coding piece of the project to a Chinese subcontractor and the consultative piece to its employees in the U.S. Or a U.S. provider might divide the work among a team of U.S.-born workers, offshore coders and foreign employees with deep functional experience.

All this goes to show that the wrong way to start any project is by focusing on where the work will be done, says Lorrie Scardino, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

"If you're trying to figure out where to do things, that's backwards," she says.

"Too many executives come at this by saying, Let's offshore."

A more strategic approach, Scardino says, is to move through a series of questions that begins not with "where" but with "why." Why are you outsourcing in the first place? What results are you expecting to gain from it? Then it makes sense to define the scope of what you intend to outsource, Scardino suggests. For instance, are you going to outsource your entire ERP platform, or just upgrades and patches?

Next comes "who," Scardino says. That requires looking at various delivery models, such as utility computing and on-site arrangements. Only when you know which providers are best at what you want done should you start exploring where the work should be done, she says.

"Imagine if you decided, 'We're going to do all our application development in India,'" she says.

"What are you going to do in three years, when India is just as expensive as San Antonio, Texas, which is cropping up as low-cost location in the U.S.? If your whole strategy is just offshoring to India, that's a very weak strategy."

Another sign of offshoring's growing maturity is the number of companies that claim they're engaging in it not for savings but to find qualified personnel.

In fact, in a recent survey of 530 U.S. and European companies by Duke University and management consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton, nearly three quarters of the companies that seek offshore talent for high-end functions such as product development or research and development reported that access to qualified personnel is the most important reason they do so.

"There simply aren't enough high-skilled engineering and science graduates available in the U.S. to meet the demand for these resources," says Vinay Couto, an analyst at Booz Allen.

"Employers complain that the quality and skills of the available graduate pool within the U.S. is not sufficient to meet the high standards required for functions such as product development, engineering, design and other innovation-centered functions."

Finding domestic talent isn't so difficult on a "onesies-twosies" basis, according to McCabe, but "if you're looking for a large concentration of skills to handle a lot of work, it's not always here onshore." Or at least you won't find it without putting in some effort.