Roussel came up through the ranks of the Franchise Tax Board, where he spent nearly a decade in various roles, before building and leading tech for other high-profile departments — including the California Health and Human Services Agency, State Lottery and, most recently, the Department of Public Health.
Originally set to retire from CDPH in February, the outgoing CIO delayed his departure until April 30 to tie up loose ends and provide some valuable overlap with his successor. What the incoming CIO will find is a vastly different environment from what Roussel walked into back in June 2021.Since his arrival, Roussel has focused his energy on growing and optimizing the department’s large IT operations and governance footprint, with special attention to aligning its work across the 225 programs it oversees.
“What I say is, I want to change the state 80 percent, and if I moved the needle 10 percent, we’ve done a great thing,” he said. “I think I moved it at least 10 percent.”
He aims to leave CDPH in a spot where the organization is ready to run — and especially, succeed — without him because of the work to embed the right operational structure and culture. As far as he sees it, it doesn’t matter whose name is attached to the wins, as long as they’re wins.
“What we tried to do is make sure that we're directionally correct, and what I mean by this is that it's instituted in the culture of what we've done,” Roussel said. “Our infrastructure, our vision, our direction, is the right thing to do, and anybody can come in and claim their own and tweak it a little and call it by a different name and take a win.
“It doesn't have to be my way, but keep moving in the right direction,” the CIO said.
Roussel’s love of technology stretches back to his formative years and some of the most cutting-edge tech the 1970s had to offer, such as his father’s Texas Instruments calculators and coding on a Commodore 64. The exposure gave him an appreciation for how the tech worked and what it could do, but also how people interact with it.
That theme extended throughout his career as he worked to build applications and operational structures that best served the end users. This is perhaps most evident in the myriad projects he’s been involved in — the push to the cloud, remote work access, strengthening data and analytics capabilities, codifying IT governance and the adoption of emerging tech such as AI.
One area Roussel sees opportunities for state departments is in taking back some of the dependence they have on vendors and relying more heavily on the best practices and protocols they identify in their own journeys.
The state’s push into the AI space is an opportunity for departments to create their own products on tighter timelines, he said, breaking away from the more traditional, long-haul application developments.
“I think the industry is changing, and those that aren't adapting with it are going to be left behind again,” he said.
As for his next moves, Roussel has no interest in taking on another full‑time role. Instead, he plans to spend more time traveling and being with his family while remaining engaged in the public sector by providing strategic guidance and thought leadership to government organizations when needed.
