I’ve been involved in three outsourced IT shops, two mergers, and an acquisition. The bottom line is efficiency. Efficiency in operations is of paramount concern, and a fast handoff of responsibilities to the new bearers is the primary concern of any manager. The longer it takes to migrate those job responsibilities, the less payoff the higher ups get from the process.
If you can hire, train, and put to work 10 Indian or Eastern European workers for the same cost as one American, why wouldn’t you look to do so? That’s the very heart of capitalism, in my opinion: efficiency for a lower cost.
America’s business problem is her taxes. American-based corporations get put through the ringer around tax time, so much so that the larger ones, Hell even the mid-range corporations, need to have entire armies of financial accountants to keep the ship asea. With IT opex often being the largest chunk of a corporations budget, why wouldn’t they consider outsourcing to save money on hiring domestic workers who have a higher standard of living than those in burgeoning business economies like India or Mexico.
So yes, zeugma, I DO think folks driving outsourcing care about efficiency, because I’ve seen it and know how it works.
Sorry, but everywhere I've seen "outsourcing" it's been a slow moving train wreck that is so important to the big executives because it makes their numbers appear better that they'll never admit what a dismal failure it is in every way because they plan to jump ship before it crushes the organizations where it has been introduced.