Mott's insourcing plan appears to have strong top-level support at GM.

The recently obtained recording of a a recent conference call where GM Chairman and CEO Dan Akerson spoke with employees and was was critical of GM's outsourcing path. "We have a 1970s IT overlay in a company that's operating in the 21st century," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Regarding Austin, in May the U.S. Department of Labor, in a report, said jobs in computer and mathematical group accounted for 5.9% of local area employment in the Austin area, "significantly higher than the 2.7% share nationally."

Included in the overall total of 46,000 IT jobs in that area, were nearly 9,500 computer systems analysts and 8,400 software developers. System software developers were the third largest group, at just over 7,000.

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at , or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .