Techsterity OÜ · Tallinn, Estonia
Techsterity is the consulting practice of Kristo Vaher - technology architect and former Government CTO of the Republic of Estonia. The work covers digital government, solutions architecture, technology governance and engineering leadership.
Services
Each area below comes from years of building and operating these systems directly. In practice that means the advice covers not only what to do but also what it costs and where it tends to fail.
Strategy, architecture and data exchange for national-scale digital services, including interoperability frameworks and digital government assessments. I co-led Estonia's digital government strategy and was lead author of its interoperability framework.
Development principles, cross-functional requirements, technology standards and engineering community leadership. Good governance reduces friction for teams - it sets clear defaults instead of adding another layer of reporting.
Hands-on design of service architectures. Decoupled systems can be scaled and replaced part by part, therefore change stays affordable as the organization grows.
Team workflows and delivery practices for startups and large organizations. I help teams keep the practices that support delivery and remove the ones that only add overhead.
Open source policy and practice for governments and companies. I authored Estonia's government-wide open source principles, including the licensing and maintenance questions that come with them.
Connecting technology decisions to business and public-service outcomes: architecture reviews, technology due diligence and advisory for leadership teams. A decision is justified when it can be traced to a measurable result.
Approach
I have worked for almost twenty years as a senior engineer, tech team lead, consultant and technology architect in government, banking and internet media. For five of those years I was the Government CTO of the Republic of Estonia, responsible for the architecture vision, technology strategy and development principles of the state and for leading its engineering community.
Today I am the Technology Director at Digital Nation, where I help build future-ready digital societies. I am also the CTO of the international GovStack initiative for designing better standards for government technologies.
I am most known as an outside-the-box-thinking evangelist for API-centric development and Domain-Driven Design. I am a strong believer in de-centralized, non-monolithic and autonomous microservice oriented architecture, which enables fast scaling and natural migration of technology. I hold the same conviction about Agile methodologies and I frequently consult developers and startups. I am also experienced in implementing AI-driven workflows and processes into digital services.
Track record
Government, banking and internet media share one core problem - critical systems that must keep changing without breaking. Every role below dealt with that problem at a different scale.
Digital government policy, architecture and advisory for future-ready digital societies, including assessment tools and automation.
Technology strategy and governance for the international standardization of digital government building blocks - data exchange, digital identity and more. Original author of the GovStack architecture vision in 2020.
Architecture vision and technology strategy for the government stack. Co-lead of the national digital strategy, lead author of the interoperability framework, the cross-functional requirements and the open source principles.
Architecture quality assurance and cross-domain integrations for nationally critical information systems - web, mobile and APIs.
Built the service layer of an award-winning core banking system. Early adopter of Docker and microservices in live banking, author of group-wide DevOps and CI/CD principles.
Business-critical platforms across Estonian software, media and e-commerce - from mass-scale email systems to a military training simulator for the Estonian Defence Forces.
Contact
For advisory, workshops or exchanging thoughts, email is the fastest way to reach me.