Sandra Scheeres, Senator for Education, Youth and Family: “With the new IT process, the administrative work in Berlin's youth welfare offices will be digitalized to an extensive degree. This speeds up processes and leaves more time for personal consultations. Documents are now also kept completely digitally. Access to residents' registration data, address, and social space data, and payment transactions takes place directly within the specialized procedure, in compliance with data protection. All of this is an enormous simplification of work and a step into the future of administration.”

Youth welfare services include outpatient and inpatient assistance for children and their families, counseling, educational assistance in the family and institutions, emergency assistance for children, and support with maintenance issues. The software solution, which has now been fully deployed since January, makes the application, assessment, billing, and documentation of such services in Berlin's youth welfare offices more efficient and fully digital.

The new IT procedure was introduced in several domains of youth welfare: Assistance in raising children, guardianship, general assistance, and advance child support payments over a five-year project period. In addition, specialized procedures were made available for youth court assistance and the Berlin emergency service for child protection, which now enable completely digital administrative processes in these areas as well. The youth welfare offices, which act as independent clients, can thus exchange case data with each other in compliance with data protection regulations.

As part of the project, Fraunhofer FOKUS conducted the requirements analysis, from this developed a performance specification and the tender documents, accompanied the awarding of the contract, and provided quality assurance for the adaption of the selected software and the accompanying organizational development project.

Dr. Jens Klessmann, head of the Digital Public Services business unit at Fraunhofer FOKUS: “We are very pleased that the multi-stage rollout went so well. After migrating the legacy data, the solution is now fully operative, so our approach has created a functioning e-government service architecture for Berlin's youth welfare system.”

The new IT specialist procedure for youth welfare is based on the SoPart® software from GAUSS-LVS and is an additional component of the ISBJ platform. The basis for the technical implementation is a component-based and service-centric application and security architecture designed by Fraunhofer FOKUS. With the go-live in January 2021, the ISBJ project has entered the next project phase: In the next step, an impact measurement including an evaluation of the types of help will take place. Implementing an agile mode of operation, the IT processes will be continuously developed and improved.