Josh Geballe, a former IBM executive and tech entrepreneur who was hired by Gov. Ned Lamont to modernize state government before being asked to coordinate the response to COVID-19, is leaving the administration.
Geballe, the commissioner of the Department of Administrative Services and the state’s chief operating officer, said Tuesday he has accepted a post at Yale overseeing a new innovation and entrepreneurial program.
Lamont named Michelle Gilman, who is the deputy to Geballe, as the new commissioner of administrative services, a key post as the state continues to modernize technology and faces an expected wave of retirements in July.
About one quarter of the executive branch workforce will be eligible to retire on July 1, 2022, when a concession deal negotiated in 2017 by the administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy takes effect.
Geballe was one among a group of mid-career, private-sector executives who joined the administration, first at the Department of Administrative Services, the agency that oversees hiring, purchasing and information technology.
He took on the additional job of chief operating officer in February 2020, just days before COVID was detected.
Lamont has credited Geballe with overseeing the efforts that have allowed Connecticut residents to do more business with the state online, including renewing driver’s licenses.
Like Lamont, Geballe is a graduate of the School of Management at Yale. (His mother, Shelley, a lawyer and professor of public health at Yale, is a founding board member of the nonprofit Connecticut News Project Inc., operator of CTMirror.org.)
After leaving IBM, Geballe became chief executive officer of Core Informatics, a software startup that the Hartford Business Journal included in its 2017 list of best places to work in Connecticut. Thermo Fisher Scientific bought the company the same year.