Lack of Task History

Summary

IBM BAW does not allow to access the history of a given task. IBM BAI does not allow to build this history neither.

The Task database only contains the latest state of a Task. Events generated by the product related to tasks don’t have enough information to build an exhaustive and useful view of the history of a task.

Context

BPCE is using IBM BAW as the foundation for their new Workflow system with the objective to implement their business workflows and orchestrate work from their agents.

Business Requirement

In this context, it is important for a workflow participant, when performing a task, to have an exhaustive view of all tasks related to the current case. The requirement is to have access to a timeline that displays all tasks that are on-going and assigned to other participants, and all tasks that have been completed in the context of the current request which is associated to the current process instance.

The user needs to be able to see the details of the related task to have an overall context of the request, answer customer questions and perform appropriate actions.

The timeline should list all tasks from the beginning of the process up to now. For each task, the user would like to see the status of the task as well as a summary of the task and actions that are pending or have been performed. If the user needs more context about a given task, he wants to be able to see the details (for instance, all comments that have been created for this task).

A supervisor or an auditor needs to have visibility of the actions or tasks performed on a given request (process instance). Even if the processing of the request has been completed.

Here is an example of a timeline of task in the current system:

What can’t be done today

IBM BAW does not provide a timeline of all tasks of a process instance and does not provide an history of a task out-of-the-box.

IBM Business Automation Insights is collecting events related to processes and tasks but does not provide enough information to achieve the requirement.

Technical limitations

BAW does not store the history of a task. The Task DB only contains the latest state of the task, but individual actions on the task are not stored in the DB.

For example, if the task has been assigned successively to multiple participants, it is impossible to have access to this history.

BAI can be configured to build an history of tasks and events related to the tasks. However,

using Timeseries in BAI does not seem to solve the problem because the intermediate events are not coming with enough information that would allow to relate the event to an action done on the task.

For instance, an event like "ACTIVITY_RESOURCE_ASSIGNED" can be related to a user claiming the task or the task is assigned by a manager to a team. However not enough information is attached to the event to relate it to the concrete action that has been performed.

Accessing the task information in BAW database would also be limited by the limitation

described in https://ideas.ibm.com/ideas/IWF-I-1108