Digital transformation often evokes images of sleek technologies and data-driven solutions, but for Sudhir Kesavan, Chief Operating Officer of CitiusTech, it is far more tangible—a carefully orchestrated blend of innovation, talent development, and measurable impact.

At its core, digital transformation is not simply about adopting cutting-edge tools; it’s about creating a culture where continuous learning and innovation are woven into the fabric of the organisation.

“Digital transformation has been around for more than a decade in common parlance. Interestingly enough, it has gone through generational changes even within the decade,” Sudhir told People Matters in an exclusive interview.

“The pace of change means we need to be an organisation that enables and fosters a culture of continuous learning and continuous innovation. To me, they go hand in hand,” he said.

“We’ve set ourselves a target that we will impact 50 million patients through the work that we do for our clients. And the impact that we can have on our customers’ customers is far more inspiring for us.

That enables a virtuous cycle back into our organisation.

“Today, we are at a place where technology is helping improve healthcare outcomes. We do that in a manner where it’s not just about the provisioning of a service, but the provisioning of support.”

The infinity loop of excellence

Sudhir envisions innovation as an ‘infinity loop’ where the ripple effects of empowering teams and streamlining internal processes ultimately lead to improved patient outcomes, optimised client assets, and, most significantly, a healthier world. This philosophy underscores CitiusTech’s ambitious mission: to positively influence the lives of patients through the work they do for their clients.

“[With] the support we provide to our talent, the continuous learning culture that we provide, the ability for them to feel that they have been empowered to innovate, you can imagine an ‘infinity loop’ with the impact that we have on our clients,” Sudhir said.

“[You will see] digital transformation translating into real-world outcomes of improvement in patient scores, improvement in the utilisation of our clients’ assets, but most importantly, improvement in the health outcomes of patients. To me, digital transformation is really about linking our internal processes, our talent impact on our clients and our clients’ impact on their patients,” he said.

“If you’re able to create that virtuous cycle through technology, that’s the promise of digital transformation and that’s the journey we are on.”

Democratising innovation

Central to this vision is a commitment to fostering a culture of innovation that transcends hierarchies and silos. Sudhir highlights the importance of ‘democratising innovation,’ where every team member is not only encouraged but empowered to solve unspoken problems and go beyond contractual obligations.

“If there is a catalyst for ensuring that the culture of an organisation stays relevant in a digitally transformative future, then that catalyst would be the culture of innovation itself,” Sudhir said.

What we try to achieve there is to democratise innovation as much as possible.

“Every one of our teams, literally every one of our teams, is empowered to do what is necessary. It could be that they saw a problem that the customer has not spoken about, but they know that that problem needs to be solved. They go ahead and solve it. It could be a better way of doing something.

“This is not something that we simply encourage. We monitor this. So we not only talk about it; we also measure it. We see which teams deliver. Then we use that to learn from it so that we can continuously scale. We want to foster a culture of innovation.

“That’s why we are empowering you to do what is necessary to be done, to deliver over and above what the client’s contracted scope for us is. This is the grounds-up work that we do. The second activity that we do is, we are fortunate enough to work with 140-plus customers in the healthcare and life sciences space,” he said.

Collective ingenuity and insight

By combining collective ingenuity with insights gleaned from partnering with over 140 healthcare and life sciences clients, CitiusTech achieves a unique duality: solving immediate challenges while contributing to industry-wide thought leadership.

“What that gives us is a unique advantage of seeing some of the truly cutting-edge work of solving hard problems. And as we solve those hard problems and are trusted to solve those hard problems, we come to the other end of the spectrum from grounds-up to cutting-edge work,” Sudhir said.

“Looking at that work of ensuring that our client’s agenda is successful and pushing that boundary even further results in sometimes our talent being the ones that bring out industry-wide papers, even before everybody else or anybody else has thought about it. We encourage our talent to think about thought leadership.”

For Sudhir, the true promise of digital transformation lies in this virtuous cycle—linking internal creativity with external impact, ensuring both clients and their customers thrive in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

We focus on grounds-up innovation. We focus on thought leadership.

“And we intersect between the two on a fairly regular basis. We ensure that there is alignment across the organisation for what we are taking bets on. We measure [our success] based on customer impact … Innovation is a joyful exercise,” he said.

“But our real joy or happiness comes from the impact that we make on our clients and our [clients’ customers], and reflecting it to us in terms of longevity of the work that we do with them and the trust that we have [from] them.”