President Obama is putting former CEO Jeff Zients in charge of the "tech surge" — the administration's emergency effort to fix the Web portal at the heart of the federal government's new health care market. But what about the contractors that built the system? What's their responsibility?
You may have never heard of CGI, but it's the Canadian information technology company that had the biggest piece of the project. In its hometown of Montreal, it's a big deal.
The company "got started a number of years ago with a couple of guys from Quebec City who didn't even speak English," says Karl Moore, a business professor at Montreal's McGill University who knows the company well.
"They've gone from those humble roots, moved to Montreal, and then started to grow. And they grew a lot through acquisition," he says.
CGI is now Canada's biggest tech company, and it sells IT services around the world. Moore says the company has a good reputation. But there have been some problems. Just last year, the province of Ontario fired CGI for failing to deliver a health care-related IT project on time.
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