WYERWORKS ADVISORY DPI & PRIVATE DATA GOVERNANCE
STRATEGIC ADVISORY // DPI, IDENTITY DATA & DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE // UNIV. OF OSLO PhD & UNIV. OF EDINBURGH AFFILIATION

Digital Infrastructure Change That Protects the People Behind the Data

Wyerworks Advisory helps governments and international organisations plan and carry out change to digital infrastructure handling sensitive personal data: identity systems, health records, civil registries. Advice is grounded in rigorous practitioner frameworks such as the WHO mHealth guidelines, a PhD on how identity infrastructure fails the people it's meant to serve, and 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 before budget is spent, including the judgment call to walk away from an approach entirely when the risk to the people it affects outweighs the operational benefit.

PRACTICE AREA // 02

Delivery at Scale, Under Real Constraints

Designing and building systems that hold up at national or regional scale, tens or hundreds of thousands of records, unreliable power, no connectivity, without the identity-data protections being the first thing cut when conditions get hard.

PRACTICE AREA // 03

Course Correction & Handover

Reviewing systems already in the field that need to change direction, recommending the path forward, and delivering the fix, with local ownership built in from the start so protection doesn't quietly lapse the moment the consultant leaves.

ADVISORY TRACK RECORD

Three Engagements. One Question Underneath Each: Does This Change Put Anyone at Risk?

Sometimes the answer means recommending against a change entirely, as with a biometric data arrangement stopped on protection grounds. Sometimes it means proving that change can be delivered reliably at real scale without cutting the protections that matter most under pressure. And sometimes it means fixing a system already in the field so it keeps protecting people after the consultant is gone.

ARCHITECTURE & VENDOR SELECTION DECLINED ON PRIVACY GROUNDS

Advising Against a Biometric Data Arrangement

Advised an international development partner against continuing a biometric data arrangement with a private-sector supplier, on data protection grounds, for a displaced and stateless population. The recommendation was accepted and the arrangement was discontinued.

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

Rural Education 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 on foot, with unreliable power and no mobile signal. Designed and built a digitised data collection system running on 100 thin-client laptops built to work reliably under those conditions, using a train-the-trainer model so the system didn't depend on outside support to keep running.

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

Regional Healthcare Communication System, Myanmar

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

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

Architecture That Enforces Data Protection by Design

When data involves sensitive personal histories, vulnerable populations, or protection status, a poorly designed workflow doesn't just create inefficiency, it excludes people and puts them at risk. We help organisations build secure workflows that hold up under those 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 transitions or displacement records, to prevent forced categorisation and unauthorised exposure.

Gender Re-categorisation Disability Data Refugee Identity
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 the standard, not setting the standard, so identity architectures account for real operational conditions on the ground.

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 governments and international NGOs on infrastructure decisions, architecture and vendor choices, delivery at scale, and course correction, each one weighed against its consequences for the people whose data it holds. Her advice is grounded in over 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, which is deployed across 80 low- and middle-income countries, building tooling in Python and React while scoping deeper civil registry integration. That hands-on work in Python, Java, React, and PostgreSQL is what her advisory recommendations are grounded in.

Katherine is currently serving as the identity data specialist on the early design of a multi-country DHIS2-based tracking system for an international NGO. In this active engagement, she is directly translating OCHA data responsibility guidelines and IFRC protection standards into the system's core architecture, ensuring GDPR Article 9 safeguards are hardcoded into the infrastructure before deployment.

PhD, Dept. of Informatics University of Oslo (2021 – 2025) Specialised in 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 impact 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

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