Managing workflows

You can use workflows to manage business processes. A workflow defines the sequence of steps that must be completed and the decisions that must be made to support a specific process.

For example, you can use workflows to make sure that the following actions happen:

  • Purchase requests are reviewed by the right decision-makers.
  • Change requests are carefully considered before they are implemented or rejected.
  • Contracts are thoroughly reviewed in a timely manner.

Service This feature is available only when one of the IBM Knowledge Catalog editions is installed.

BaseStandardPremium Unless otherwise noted, this information applies to all editions of IBM Knowledge Catalog.

You can either use one of the predefined workflows for certain governance tasks, or create custom workflows that meet your business needs.

Predefined workflows

Governance artifact workflows
You can use the governance artifact predefined workflows to manage the process of creating, updating, and deleting of governance artifacts.
IBM Match 360 remediation workflows
With IBM Match 360, you can use the predefined potential matches workflow to review and evaluate potential record matches in your entity data. You can make link or unlink decisions to improve data quality and increase confidence in your entity data. For more information, see Configuring IBM Match 360 workflows.
Data quality SLA rules remediation workflows
BasePremium When you create a new data quality SLA rule, you specify which action to take if an asset does not meet the specified requirements. You can select a workflow configuration to start a remediation task for an asset that violates the specific rule. For more information, see Managing data quality remediation workflows.

Custom workflows

You can create two kinds of custom workflows:
Custom governance artifact workflows
You can use Flowable to customize the predefined governance artifact workflows that you can use to manage the process of creating, updating, and deleting of governance artifacts.
Custom request workflows
You can create workflows to manage requests.

You can use Flowable to create your own process definitions that you can import to Cloud Pak for Data as a new workflow type. A workflow type is the set of resources and configurations that support your business process.

For example, if you need to manage purchase requests, you can create a new request workflow type that contains different workflow templates based on the number of reviews and approvals you want to include in the workflow. In this example, small purchase requests, such as a new office chair, requires fewer approvals than an expensive request, such as 100 server racks, so it does not make sense to use the same template for both requests. Your process definition can include multiple workflow templates with different task forms.

After you import a process definition to Cloud Pak for Data, you can create different configurations to specify the following conditions:
  • The actions that trigger workflows.
  • The template that is associated with a trigger.
  • The users who are responsible for completing the steps in the workflow.
  • The users who must be notified about specific steps in the workflow.