“Information Technology is not an end in itself!“

Wirtschaftsforum: Mr Fraenzke, birkle IT AG’s mission is: “We digitalize companies”. Where exactly do you start?

Thomas Fraenzke: There are many companies that offer digitalization solutions. However, the key difference lies in how we at birkle IT AG ultimately provide these services. With our Bestshoring model, we consistently rely on the established digitalization expertise from the Baltic region, the innovation hub in Europe. Our branches in Tallinn, Estonia and Vilnius, Lithuania are staffed by highly specialized specialists whose extensive expertise we combine with the established process know-how of our German company in correspondingly agile organizational structures, enabling us to quickly present tangible results in short development cycles and create real added value.

We support our customers both within the scope of classic staff augmentation and through comprehensive solution engineering – i.e. the outsourcing of all or part of the software development project – but we are also happy to provide entire dedicated teams if required, which assume responsibility for the entire scope of the solution in question.

Wirtschaftsforum: How exactly does birkle IT AG approach a digitalization project?

Thomas Fraenzke: You have to realize that IT is not an end in itself, but must always satisfy a specific business need. Let’s look at an example from the insurance segment: in the event of a specific claim, the end customer would ideally like to simply upload their invoice and then be reimbursed the amount – simply entering their insurance or account number or answering any queries actually makes the process unnecessarily complex. Whether the insurance company handles its claims management with the help of AI or whether it is only partially automated is of little importance to the end customer: they want the process to be as simple as possible – and the insurance company wants a lean, high-performance, reliable, low-maintenance and affordable IT infrastructure. But you have to think about this from the end and therefore ask the right questions at the very beginning of the project to avoid missing the mark.

Wirtschaftsforum: Many companies now have a jungle of different IT systems – doesn’t that make your day-to-day work much more difficult than it used to be?

Thomas Fraenzke: Here too, the right questions are worth their weight in gold – because then you get the right answers and can anticipate many pitfalls at an early stage and, at best, avoid them. In an initial ideation workshop, we therefore take a detailed look at the complexity that the customer already has and where we can make a meaningful contribution to reducing it effectively. At the same time, the many unique solutions that have been implemented in practice in a wide variety of use cases are a real treasure trove of possibilities that can also provide sustainable benefits in other application contexts. For example, some companies specialize exclusively in contract conclusion procedures, while others concentrate on invoicing procedures. birkle IT AG orchestrates these various processes and different areas from start to finish in order to create a standardized digital solution for the end customer.