The HR pros call it attrition. On any particular project outsourced to a service provider in India, you can expect at least a 15 percent turnover rate for personnel assigned to the project within a year. For some projects, BPO chief among them, it is not unheard of for a whole staff to turn over by year's end, according to Paul Schmidt, a partner in the global services delivery practice at TPI, one of the larger sourcing advisory organizations.

With technology so closely tied to business strategy, to talk about BPO today is to understand the consequences of not being able to deliver expected services in a timely manner due to high turnover.

Schmidt puts it much better than I can: "There is a tremendous opportunity for value leakage," he tells me. In other words, if you don't pay enough attention up front to the realities of attrition at your service provider, you will end up with higher costs, lower-quality deliverables, or, worse, a project that goes bust.

The high attrition rate, particularly in India, finds its roots in the phenomenal growth of outsourcing and offshoring. A recently completed TPI study, "India: An Attractive BPO Destination Marred by Alarming Attrition" by Dinesh Goel and Prabhash Thakur, pegs the growth of BPO attrition during the past three years at approximately 50 percent per year.

What's fueling this attrition is that, despite all you may have heard about how many computer science majors graduate from Indian universities annually, there is a finite talent pool -- and those graduates know it.