BANGALORE: If this signals a trend, Indian IT has reason to worry. Randy Mott, General Motor’s new chief information officer, plans to cut the quantum of the company’s IT outsourcing from 90% to 10% in the next three years.

Today, outsourcing companies such as HP/EDS, IBM , Capgemini , and Wipro provide about 90% of GM’s IT services—from running data centres to writing applications. GM employees do only 10%. Mott plans to flip those percentages in about three years.

“Mott is a number guy and he plans to flip one set of numbers on a scale that no CIO has ever done before,” reports InformationWeek.

As part of that effort, Mott plans to create three new software development centres, all of them in the US. “IT outsourcers, including GM’s one-time captive provider, EDS, face the loss of contracts once valued at up to $3 billion a year,” the article said.

The publication says that Mott, who previously worked in Wal-mart, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, believes that outsourced IT cannot deliver the creative, business-changing ideas that GM needs, and cannot do it fast enough. But can Mott realistically flip the percentages around? There are plenty of sceptics in India. One analyst, who did not want to be named, said the announcement was likely stage-managed to make US president Barack Obama look good in the run-up to the presidential election in November. The US government owns a 26% stake in GM, following the bailout the company received in the last recession, and the company is often referred to sarcastically as Government Motors.

Obama has made “bringing jobs back home to America” as something of an election war-cry, and Mott’s announcement is being seen by some to be just part of that rhetoric. “Business realities do not allow for such quantum arrest of outsourcing. No company has the wherewithal to do 90% of the work in house,” said the analyst. Besides, insourcing IT on the scale envisaged by Mott will require GM to go on a hiring binge for software developers, project managers, database experts, business analysts, and other IT professionals in the US over the next three years.

Ankur Rudra, IT analyst at brokerage firm Ambit Capital, notes that tech talent in the US is expensive and it is more likely that Mott would focus on insourcing of onsite work given to IBM, Capgemini etc, and not the work offshored to cheaper locations like India.

Amneet Singh, VP at outsourcing consulting firm Everest Group, also says such substantial changes cannot be brought about so quickly “as outsourcing contracts have a certain degree of stickiness”.