WYERWORKS ADVISORY DPI & Sensitive Personal Data &
STRATEGIC ADVISORY // DPI, IDENTITY DATA & DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE // UNIV. OF OSLO PhD & UNIV. OF EDINBURGH AFFILIATION

Digital Infrastructure Change That Doesn't Put People at Risk

Wyerworks Advisory helps public sector institutions and international organisations plan and carry out change to digital infrastructure that handles sensitive personal data: identity systems, health records, civil registries. The advice comes out of practitioner frameworks like the WHO mHealth guidelines, a PhD on how identity infrastructure can fail the people it's meant to serve, and 12 years of hands-on engineering delivery across health, education, and displacement contexts.

PRACTICE PRINCIPAL: Dr Katherine Wyers (PhD, Univ. of Oslo)
RESEARCH AFFILIATION: Visiting Researcher, Univ. of Edinburgh (STIS)
DOMAIN: Infrastructure Strategy, Identity Data & DPI Architecture
View Leadership & Expertise Explore Advisory Track Record
PRACTICE AREA // 01

Architecture & Vendor Selection

Advising on which systems, standards, and suppliers to commit to. Sometimes that means recommending a build. Sometimes it means recommending against one, walking away from an approach becasue the risk to the people it afffects it higher than the operational upside.

PRACTICE AREA // 02

Delivery at Scale, Under Real Constraints

Designing and building systems that hold up at national and regional scale with hundreds of thousands of records and with reliable electricity infrastructures and little or no mobile connectivity. The identity-data protections have to survive contact with those conditions.

PRACTICE AREA // 03

Course Correction & Handover

Reviewing systems already in the field that need to change direction, recommending the path forward, and then doing the work of delivering it. Building in local ownership from day one to ensure that data protection and data quality remain when the consulting runway ends.

ADVISORY TRACK RECORD

Three Engagements. One Question Running Through Each

Does this change put anyone at risk? Once, the answer was to recommend against a biometric data intervetion on grounds of safeguarding and protection. Another time, it was proving that change can be delivered reliably at scale without compromising on data protection for vulnerable populations. And once, it meant fixing a system that was already in the field to it kept people's sensitive data safe.

ARCHITECTURE & VENDOR SELECTION DECLINED ON PRIVACY GROUNDS

Advising Against a Biometric Data Intervention

Advised an international development partner against proceeding with a Public-Private Partnership biometric data project on data protection grounds, for a displaced and vulnerable population. The recommendation was accepted and the projects was put on hold until the necessary safeguards could be introduced.

Biometric Data Displaced & Stateless Populations Vendor Risk Assessment
DELIVERY AT SCALE, UNDER REAL CONSTRAINTS USAID / WORLD EDUCATION

State Education Authority, Tracking System, East Myanmar

A regional education authority in East Myanmar, on a project led by World Education and funded by USAID, oversaw primary and secondary education for 180,000 students across 1,700 schools, most reachable only by foot, with unreliable electricity infrastructure and no mobile signal. Designed and built a digitised data collection system running on 100 thin-client laptops, built to hold up under those conditions, and trained local staff to train others in local languages so the system wouldn't need outside support to keep running.

180,000 Students 1,700 Schools Offline / Unreliable Power Infrastructure
COURSE CORRECTION & HANDOVER WHO mHEALTH FRAMEWORK

Regional Healthcare Communication System, Myanmar

Reviewed an existing operational communication system across healthcare clinics in Myanmar, advising the NGO's leadership on adopting the WHO mHealth framework. Then built, tested, and monitored the replacement before a full handover for local ownership and maintenance. A 20-week regional engagement, handling personal data to WHO guideline standards.

Healthcare Data 20-Week Engagement Local Ownership Handover
DPI ARCHITECTURE & DATA PROTECTION

Architecture That Enforces Data Protection by Design

When the data involves sensitive personal information, vulnerable populations, or protection status, a poorly designed workflow isn't just inefficient. It excludes people, and it puts them at risk. This work focuses on the operational side of DPI, building secure workflows that hold up under these conditions.

SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE INTEROPERABLE

Sovereign Interoperability & DHIS2

Analysing and improving data flows between national health management systems (DHIS2), civil registries (CRVS), and field logs, without violating local data sovereignty.

DHIS2 Ecosystem Workflow Alignment Open Standards
HIGH-STAKES ATTRIBUTES SPECIAL CATEGORY

Consequential Data Protection

Structuring sensitive personal categories such as gender identity transition and displacement records to prevent forced categorisation and unauthorised exposure.

Gender Re-categorisation Disability Data Refugee Status
GOVERNANCE & TRUST GDPR ART. 9

Inclusive-by-Design Governance

Designing systems that hold up under strict purpose limitation, zero-trust role access, and auditable data lineage. Built to standard so the architecture accounts for what actually happens on the ground, not just what the specs say should happen.

Purpose Bound Standards-Compliant Architecture Auditable Lineage
PRACTICE LEADERSHIP

A Decade Building Infrastructure, Then a PhD on Why It Fails People

Dr Katherine Wyers

Principal, Wyerworks Advisory • PhD, University of Oslo

Katherine leads Wyerworks Advisory, advising public sector institutions and international organisations on infrastructure decisions, architecture and vendor choices, delivery at scale, and course correction. Each decision is weighed against the consequences for the peopel whose data it holds. That advice is grounded in more than 12 years of hands-on technical direction and software delivery in operationally demanding, low-resource, and regulated environments.

Her experience spans building refugee identity systems across active border zones in South East Asia, scaling offline education data management across thousands of schools, delivering clinical research data infrastructure, and supporting provincial-scale open-source education rollouts (OpenEMIS/UNESCO).

She's an independent contributor to the DHIS2 ecosystem, deployed across 80 low- and middle-income countries, building tooling in Python and React while scoping deeper civil registry integration. The advisory recommendations are grounded in that hands-on work in Python, Java, React, and PostgreSQL.

She's currently the identity data specialist on the early design of a multi-country DHIS2-based tracking system for an international NGO, and active engagement translating OCHA data responsibility guidelines and IFRC protection standards directly into the system's core architecture, and complying with GDPR Article 9 safeguards.

PhD, Dept. of Informatics University of Oslo (2021 – 2025) Digital Public Infrastructure and structural exclusion in government data systems.
Affiliated / Visiting Researcher University of Edinburgh (STIS) Science, Technology & Innovation Studies (March 2026 – Present).
MSc, Software Engineering University of Hertfordshire Outstanding Distinction, Board of Examiners Award.
Core Ecosystems DHIS2, OpenEMIS, CRVS, Health ICTs
PEER-REVIEWED RESEARCH

Selected Publications & Academic Output

Examining how large-scale government identity systems affect marginalised populations, gender re-categorisation, and street-level information system use.

BEST PAPER AWARD // SCIS 2025
Identity Categories as Boundary Objects: Conflict and Resistance in Collaboration
Scandinavian Conference on Information Systems (2025)
DOCTORAL DISSERTATION
Information Infrastructural Violence: A critical, intersectional study of gender re-categorisation in government information infrastructure
University of Oslo (2025)
BOOK CHAPTER
Making Personal Data Personal: The Emergence of Enactive Data in Organisations
Technology, Management, and Design for Social Justice, Springer (2026)
JOURNAL PUBLICATION
Health ICTs and Transgender Health Equity: A Research Agenda
Information Technology for Development (2024)
INITIATE ENGAGEMENT

Contact the Practice

Inquire about workflow audits, advisory capacity, or architectural consultations.