In our meeting with N.K. Venkatnarayanan (Bobby) at TCS, he made an interesting observation. BPO is the human intervention part of IT services. As I think about it more, it makes sense. Most IT tasks have human touch points. It could be simple data entry, use of heuristics or rules or exercising judgement on a task. As the level of expertise required from the person goes higher, the margins increase for the company and the retention levels improve.