SAS Intelligent Decisioning: Workflow Administration
In SAS Intelligent Decisioning (as of stable 2025.03), you can manage workflow tasks on the Home page. The Tasks section at the bottom of the home page lists the active workflow tasks to which you or a group of which you are a member have been assigned. You can claim, complete, and release tasks from the home page.
Before any tasks will be listed on the home page, an Administrator must first configure the workflow(s) for use with SAS Intelligent Decisioning. In this post, I will review these workflow configuration activities by using the Sample Decision Approval workflow as an example.
Workflow Administration
Workflows are administered in the SAS Workflow Manager application. This application is accessed from the Viya menu by selecting the Manage Workflows option under the Administration area. There are some sample workflow definitions that are delivered as part of the SAS Viya installation. The Client Identifier column indicates the application where the workflow can be used.
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For this demo, we will focus on the Sample Decision Approval workflow for SAS Intelligent Decisioning.
Selecting the hyperlink on the workflow definition name opens the workflow. Below is the workflow definition for Sample Decision Approval.
The Sample Decision Approval workflow has four user tasks:
- Develop decision
- Review decision
- Prepare decision for deployment
- Deploy decision.
It is recommended to create a copy of any of the sample workflow definitions before making any changes. To copy the Sample Decision Approval workflow definition, I select the More options menu and then Save as.
I name my copy of the workflow definition Decision Approval.
I select the Definition properties button to view its settings.
I select the Client identifier of SAS Intelligent Decisioning to enable this workflow definition for use in that application.
I then select 
Authorize a Workflow
Before any users can select a workflow and start it, they must be granted Read permission to the workflow definition. To do this, an administrator must first open the workflow definition. Select the More options menu and then Authorization.
Select the user(s) and/or group(s) that should have permission to use the selected workflow definition and set the authorization to Read. An administrator may want to create group(s) for this purpose. In my case, I created a group called Workflow Users and added several user(s) to that group.
Add Participants to Workflow Tasks
On each user task within the workflow definition, an administrator needs to add the user(s) and/or group(s) who should have permission to participate in that task.
For the Develop decision user task, I add the Workflow Users group as a Participant.
For the Review decision user task, I add the Workflow Users group as a Participant.
For the Prepare decision for deployment user task, I add the Workflow Users group as a Participant. I also exclude the user Alex as a participant.
For the Deploy decision user task, I add the Workflow Users group as a Participant. I also exclude the users Alex and Sarah as a participant.
I save the workflow definition and select 
Configuration Settings
It is recommended that an administrator turn on the sas.businessrules.publish.hideRuleSetPublish configuration property. If turned on, then the Publish button is hidden for rule sets. It is recommended that you turn on this property so that all published content is developed in a decision's workflow. For more information, refer to its documentation.
Optionally, an administrator can also configure the length of time that workflow history items are retained using the sas.workflowhistory.eventlog configuration property. The default is 30 days. For more information, see Configure History Event Properties in SAS Workflow Manager: Administrator’s Guide.
Summary
Workflow tasks are now integrated on the Home screen of SAS Intelligent Decisioning. However, before you can use workflows with decisions, an administrator needs to perform some configuration. In this post, I acted as an administrator and configured the Decision Approval workflow. In my next post, I will demonstrate how to use this Decision Approval workflow in a decision.
For more information, refer to the Configure SAS Workflow for Use with SAS Intelligent Decisioning documentation.
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