Car maker General Motors has announced plans to create 500 new IT roles at a new innovation centre in Texas, and cut back its use of outsourcing.

The 500 roles include software developers, project managers, database experts and business analysts, the company said in a statement.

According to a Bloomberg news report, the innovation center is part of a wider initiative to reduce outsourcing, with the company looking to hire 10,000 workers as part of a total technology plan in the next three to five years.

The report says that GM CIO Randy Mott – formerly CIO of HP – wants to increase the proportion of IT work done in-house from 10% to 90%.

“We want IT to keep up with the imagination of our GM business partners, and to do that, we plan to rebalance the employment model over the next three years so that the majority of our IT work is done by GM employees focused on extending new capabilities that further enable our business,” he said.

Mott added the innovation centers would be used to design and deliver “IT that drives down the cost on going operations” while delivering innovative products and services to GM’s customers faster.

“The next generation of IT workers, the talented visionaries we want contributing at the Innovation Center, are being trained at top computer science schools in Texas and surrounding states,” Mott said.

In 2006, GM awarded a number of billion-dollar IT outsourcing contracts in one of the most complex IT outsourcing engagements. The largest lot was awarded to EDS, which was later acquired by HP – where Mott was CIO.

A year ago, fellow US mega-corporation General Electric announced plans to bring more IT staff on shore. “About 50 percent of the IT work was being done by non-GE employees,” said CIO Cherlene Begley at the time. “That strategy may have had its time, but there was a lot of downside. We lost a lot of the technical capabilities that we have to own.”