Understanding turnover among Indian IS professionals

Abstract

While much of this book focuses on offshore outsourcing from the client and supplier perspectives as experienced by senior and middle-level managers, this chapter focuses on the Indian IS professionals actually doing the work. In our research, we found that Indian IS professionals are often viewed as factors of production during the formulation of a client’s initial business strategy for offshoring IT work. Clients largely justify sending work offshore because of the lower hourly wages for presumably equivalent work. When clients actually engage in offshore outsourcing, however, these “factors of production” finally become anthropomorphous. This is when the human resource issues enter the forefront of client-supplier relationships.