In this new series of Blogposts, we will introduce the people that make Strator what it is. With this first interview, we will be introducing Ulrich Bojko, our Head of Development, by asking him about his experiences at Strator. He shares insights on the importance of experts, reliance on AI, and digital sovereignty.

Since 2025, Ulrich has become a core part of Strator. Despite this relatively young cooperation, Ulrich has proven himself to be a valuable part of the team as a man of many ideas with a rigorous work-ethic and a lot of funny jokes. As a SharePoint expert and a business development enthusiast, Ulrich helps Strator reach a little further every day by developing new tools, carrying out massive migrations, and coming up with new ways in which Strator can help companies turn their information into a competitive advantage.

How did you get started at Strator?

My career at Strator started as an external consultant. I am a SharePoint expert and had been working with SharePoint Online and on-premises since 2008. I usually tell people that I can pretty much make SharePoint do anything that they want it to. I’ve made a ton of different solutions, from contract management and QMS systems to extranets and customer portals. Some of them were completely custom-coded, but more recently they have been based on SharePoint functionalities.

Either way, I started as an external consultant for Strator because clients asked them, “Well, now you have moved all of our data into SharePoint, so can you help us do other things with this SharePoint platform?” Of course, this is a completely different speciality, which is where I came in, and I fell in love with Strator and the people there.

When I first saw Strator, it struck me as probably the most boring company I’d ever been invited to. I mean, these librarian geeks talking about classification models and V-models and validation, and all these insane abbreviations like EQ, IQ, PQ, OQ, and whatnot. I thought, “How do you not just die a little inside every day from working with this? This is like a whole new level of geekiness.”

But once I really dug into it, I realised it wasn’t that boring. The moment you need to move 3 or 4 million files without losing any of them, while having it all under control and being able to prove that you did everything correctly, it starts becoming fun. I’m not only building technical solutions, but I’m also getting my hands dirty in the piles of data.

You’re currently the Head of Development. What does that mean?

I’ve always been fond of business development, even though I was a freelancer for 10–12 years. If I saw an opportunity, an issue, or a requirement at a company that I couldn’t solve, I always liked being the one with the network to do something about it. I also love talking to a lot of companies, not just clients.

When it comes to business development, I love developing ideas into real products or real offerings that a company can deliver, given the capabilities of the team. I just like seeing how we can package it, do sales, and build a network of clients, vendors, and partners. It’s about 50% of what I do, while the other 50% is solving clients’ SharePoint issues or building things for SharePoint.

I also follow European policy and politics quite a bit as part of the business development side of things. I like seeing opportunities in politics and pinpointing them for our business or our clients.

A lot of politicians are talking about digital sovereignty at the moment, for example, and it is something I have been talking about for the past 20 years. Now, with the shifts in the political climate around the US, the need for digital sovereignty is finally showing up on people’s radars. Every conversation between a vendor and a public-sector institution, municipality, ministry, government, or whatever will have digital sovereignty as number one on the agenda.

Good thing I love advising clients on how to achieve digital sovereignty: not by purchasing a licence, but by adapting certain capabilities. Especially when there are so many misconceptions about digital sovereignty caused by so-called “sovereignty washing,” where companies market their product as the magical button to becoming sovereign. People like swiping a card and believing they are digitally sovereign after five minutes. But suddenly, your new sovereignty-solution reaches a certain limit, requiring you to buy an upgrade, or the price just goes up. Before you know it, you’re stuck with a vendor lock-in and are no longer digitally sovereign. This can happen with both open-source solutions and, let’s say, a Microsoft solution. Making sure people see that is also what I want to do by building a network.

You really seem to enjoy guiding and advising as a part of business development.

I really like having that advisory role. These days, that comes with its own difficulties, though, as AI is often used as some kind of advisor. It’s quite risky because it’s very persuasive in guiding everybody towards the same one-stop-shop solution, since the big models are based on American thinking. You could get a European AI, but either way it is going to be based on some kind of model which will guide its answer. If people want actual knowledge, based on years of experience, they still need a person giving them personalised advice. I love doing that because advice is never a one-size-fits-all situation. I love getting familiar with a company and understanding its processes. All that business development, for Strator or for a client, is something I really enjoy. It allows me to use my technical knowledge and my communication skills. Operating between the tech and the boardroom is really where I’m most at home.

Is this over-reliance on AI something you encounter often?

That and the reliance on licensing to get everything in order instead of relying on actual capability or certain structures. AI is an extremely powerful tool, but it is just a tool. It doesn't work without the proper preparations.

People don’t want to focus on the boring parts, like getting their data in order first. That lack of a solid foundation is why you see statistics showing that somewhere between 70 and 95% of AI implementations or AI projects do not actually deliver the value they were expected to. People have stopped relying on specialists and experts because of all the marketing fluff, and because they don’t have time to go deeper. Besides that, AI will always answer in the way it thinks the prompter wants to be answered, which is why it cannot have the same value as an expert.

That is also some advice I would give to readers: think slow. AI is also a bubble, and it is important to know that it can pop. Companies can go bankrupt and AI services can increase in price drastically overnight. If you’re using AI without thinking about it too much, you might eventually start using AI instead of thinking. What do you do when the bubble bursts?

Be very, very careful when replacing people with AI. It is a handy tool that doesn’t have any critical sense, it doesn’t look beyond the parameters you give it, and it might not be as certain as you think it is. It can be the biggest digital sovereignty threat you can have because, suddenly, if it stops working or gives you wrong answers while your business depends on it, what do you do?

In short: think slow, build a workflow instead of only relying on AI, and hang on to those very valuable human values and capabilities in your team during this AI age.

Lastly, is there a project in the (near) future you are looking forward to?

Well, we've been developing these small tools for clients made to increase their digital sovereignty by helping them govern their SharePoint websites. I've been calling them our "Blueprints", and I am very excited to see them come to life. I've been working on a scan we will be using for our Strategic Information Assessment - Lite, and I will soon talk more about something I've been calling "Site Lifecycle Governance" as a part of these Blueprints. We are still working on the Blueprints, but we will release more news about them as time goes on.

The post Operating Between the Tech and the Boardroom: Meet Ulrich Bojko – Head of Development appeared first on Strator.

This distinction matters more now than ever before, because the strategic stakes are real and the marketing around them is loud. Two recent and substantial pieces of work help cut through the noise: the Danish Agency for Digital Government's December 2025 report on open source in the public sector, and an international survey of sixteen digitally mature countries it commissioned the year before. Read together, they point to the same uncomfortable but useful conclusion. Digital sovereignty is a capability, and capabilities have to be built.

Sovereignty Is Not a Product You Can Buy 

It is tempting to believe that a particular kind of platform settles the question. It does not. You can be genuinely independent on a proprietary stack if you are well governed, and completely trapped on open source if you are not. The brand on the box decides very little. The organisation around it decides almost everything.

The major providers themselves demonstrate the point. Over the past year Microsoft has completed its EU Data Boundary, and introduced sovereign options such as customer-held encryption keys, Europe-based access controls and on-premises deployment of core workloads, all aimed squarely at sovereignty concerns. These are serious investments, and they make sovereignty achievable on a hyperscale commercial cloud in a way that was not possible a few years ago. At the same time, residual questions remain, such as the reach of foreign legislation over data physically stored in Europe, which no purchasing decision fully removes on its own. The lesson is not that one provider is safe and another is not. The lesson is that whatever you choose, the responsibility to understand what you hold, where it sits, and how you would abandon it if needed, does not transfer to the vendor. It stays with you.

So, the real question is never "which platform makes us digitally sovereign." It is "do we understand our configuration, own our data, know our contracts, and have a funded way to change course." Those are organisational properties, not product ones.

Control and Responsibility Are the Same Decision 

The Danish 2025 report is blunt about the trade nobody likes to name. When you take more control of your technology, you also take on more responsibility: licence terms, security updates, support, maintenance, and simply knowing what you are running. Control is not a prize you collect. It is a workload you accept. The report is careful never to claim that more openness is always better; it says the opposite. Make choices based on the value they bring, and be honest about whether you can carry out what you have chosen.

Denmark built a dedicated Open Source Office for its health sector. Although, it was technically well regarded, it withered anyway. Not because of the quality of the code, but because of a lack of organisational and financial backing. Technical excellence does not provide the capability to sustain operational backing. Funding, ownership and leadership do. Especially leadership. The same pattern appears in reverse wherever sovereignty succeeds. It is sustained by an organisation with leadership that decided to allocate resources to it, not by a licence that happened to permit it.

This is why the smallest organisations struggle the most, and why the answer is rarely a heroic in-house rebuild. Acquiring a capability is demanding precisely because it is real work, and pretending a platform removes that work is how dependence quietly accumulates.

The Preconditions Are Where Sovereignty Is Actually Built 

If digital sovereignty is a capability, the practical question becomes what that capability is made of. The Danish report, drawing on the experience of public authorities at home and abroad, sets out a clear and, helpfully, vendor-neutral list of preconditions. These preconditions apply just as much to proprietary software as to open source.

The first precondition is organisation and leadership. Someone has to back the decision, articulate why it is being made, and invest in the competence to carry it, whether that competence is built internally or bought in. The second is a deliberate decision about support and maintenance. It is needed whether the software is open source or not. All software needs support and maintenance, and leaving it unowned would be a mistake. The third is the ability to assess security and maturity, to judge whether there is an active community or a competent supplier behind a component, rather than assuming a license fee guarantees it. The fourth is genuine command of licences, contracts and data, knowing what terms bind you, where your information lives, and what your agreements actually say. The fifth is open standards and integration building, so that systems can talk to one another and, crucially, so that you could change a supplier later without dismantling everything. The last is honest lifetime economics, comparing the full cost of a solution over its life rather than its sticker price, because the value of being able to move never appears on an invoice.

None of these are technical tricks. Every one of them is a discipline. Together, they are what digital sovereignty actually consists of, and the encouraging part is that they can be deliberately developed.

No Organisation Stands Alone 

Organisations do not have to acquire the capability to posses digital sovereignty by themselves, and the most mature countries have understood this. The recurring pattern in the international survey is the rise of shared stewardship: neutral organisations that posses this capability on behalf of many. In Denmark, the OS2 community lets municipalities pool funding and competence around shared solutions, on the principle that those who rely on something help sustain it and keep the ability to change suppliers. Estonia and Finland went as far as founding a joint institution, with staff and a budget, simply to steward software they share. Italy has built a state office to guide and support adoption of open source, Germany has established both a public body to develop shared solutions and an agency to fund the maintenance of critical open source, and the European Union is assembling common building blocks several countries can draw on.

What matters is not which model wins, but that every one of them treats capability as something to be funded, staffed and shared, rather than assumed. Digital sovereignty, at scale, is a collective discipline as much as an individual one.

Digital Sovereignty Is a Leadership Posture 

Leadership, specifically the CIO and/or CTO, are the ones who need to make decisions on digital sovereignty. It is important they do so, during the procurement process itself. Data location, exit-readiness, open standards and clarity over contracts should not be afterthoughts raised once a platform is already chosen. They belong to the requirements, as standard, applied to every vendor regardless of who they are. Treated that way, digital sovereignty becomes the decision to take responsibility for your own infrastructure, to know what you run and why, and to keep your options open on purpose.

The most durable examples are governed, not improvised. Aarhus, for instance, did not become more digitally independent through a single product switch. It set a direction over many years, from a requirement to consider alternatives, to an action plan, to a digital strategy, to budgeted money set aside to widen its choice of suppliers. The throughline is not a technology. It is sustained, value-driven governance, and a refusal to let someone else set the cadence by default. The longstanding principle behind it is worth remembering: choose the best and most economical option regardless of software type.  These options need to be chosen by an organisation that understands what it is choosing.

That capability is what we build at Strator. The platform is yours either way, commercial or open, cloud or on-premises. The real question is whether you can steer it, and whether you could leave it if you ever had to. Digital sovereignty is not simply a phrase on the contract; it is the knowledge that the organisation knows its situation and has the ability to migrate if it chose so.

The post Digital Sovereignty Is Not a Licence. It Is a Capability. appeared first on Strator.