Social media – and with it an extensive and constantly growing range of internet services, platforms and networks – is increasingly finding its way into everyday life in both the private and occupational spheres. According to BITKOM (German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media), the main areas of application in the business environment are advertising, marketing, and public relations work, followed by customer services and sales. Only seven percent of the SMEs questioned use social media for knowledge management, but it's precisely here that there is still huge potential. "Social learning" is the key expression and means informal, self-organised, and networked learning supported by social media.

"In social learning, it's essential that the principles of Web 2.0 are transferred to learning. By this we understand that in the context of training measures, it must be possible for the learners to be in contact with other learners regardless of location and also be able to take part themselves in the creation and continuous improvement of the learning content", says Frank Milius, member of the Executive Board at IMC AG.

However, just providing social media is not enough to really organise learning in a social way. It's much more about placing the learners at the centre of the training measures and in an integrated way. This also involves providing the content in a role-oriented and needs-oriented way, as well as in a context-sensitive way while the users are performing the activity to be learned. IMC’s Business Process Guidance approach supports both social learning and the context-sensitive provision of software training measures.

Business Process Guidance means guiding employees through the required software systems using individual company business processes. With assistance in the form of short texts, videos, screenshots, documents, and jump marks to upstream or downstream applications, companies ensure that business processes are implemented efficiently and software systems are used correctly.

In order to give training managers insight into the implementation of social Business Process Guidance, the current white paper from IMC addresses the following questions:

• What does social learning mean?
• What does social learning look like within the framework of a software project?
• How can change-management processes be controlled using social media within the framework of a software project?