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Offshore outsourcing can keep you up at night, and not just because you’re on the phone with workers 10 time zones away. You worry because you’re handing over important work to people you can’t monitor directly and who don’t have an insider’s built-in knowledge of the way your systems and processes work, or even of your language. All the details you normally have the luxury of overlooking need to be carefully documented. Your sense of project status becomes tenuous and unsure, because you can’t see the day-to-day progress or read the expressions of the people providing you with project updates.

And what if you don’t like the way the product turns out or the code isn’t as robust as it should be? Worse yet, what if there’s a massive power outage or some other disaster where the work is being done, or you find out that your intellectual property has ended up in the hands of a competitor?

All valid concerns, and there’s more. Offshore outsourcing implies an inherent gulf—in miles, time zones, language, culture, legal and political systems, and network and communications infrastructure—between customer and supplier, which in turn makes coordination and communication more difficult and costly and introduces new and unfamiliar risks.

These very real challenges must be carefully accounted for in planning, budgeting, and managing an outsourced IT initiative.