How a Human task works
Once a workflow reaches a Human Task during execution, its behavior differs significantly from automated steps.
The workflow pauses and the task enters the EXEC state, waiting for user interaction. At this point, the human task becomes visible either to the assigned user or to all users monitoring the associated queue in the Human task dedicated page.
The user with the proper rights to work on it can then open the task and interact with the form defined. After reviewing the provided information and filling in the required fields, he marks the task as completed by selecting one of the available completion buttons.
This action triggers two important outcomes:

• The task transitions from EXEC to SUCC (Success) status
• The collected inputs and selected action are exposed as output properties

These outputs are immediately available to the rest of the workflow, enabling dynamic execution paths. For example, a workflow can branch based on an approval decision or adapt behavior depending on user-provided data.
This mechanism effectively turns human interaction into a native, data-driven step within the orchestration logic.

Manage Human Tasks
​All Human tasks can be monitored through the Human Tasks page in the HCL Universal Orchestrator UI. It can be accessed using the left side menu.

This centralized interface provides a clear overview of task status and ownership, allowing users to quickly filter tasks based on their state. Common filters include: all open tasks, tasks assigned to the current user, unassigned tasks, completed tasks.

Explore the new experience
To get started:
   1. Open the user menu in the top-right corner.
   2. Click Settings
From there, you will have everything you need to personalize your experience and control your system, all in one place.

A structured and role-aware experience
The Settings page is organized into clearly defined sections, enabling you to easily navigate and manage different aspects of your environment.
Depending on your permissions, you will see up to three main sections:

• Personal
• System
• ​Security

This role-based structure ensures that users only access what is relevant to them, reducing complexity while still enabling powerful control where needed.

Personal section: Tailor your experience
The Personal section is designed to help you make the environment truly your own.
Here, you can explore your account information, including name, user ID and group memberships or customize your UI preferences, adjusting font and row size, time zone and display format, theme (for a look and feel that matches your style). And finally you can manage your own API keys.​

​In addition, the security section enables managing API keys used for engine connections and Orchestration CLI authentication. Administrators can create and organize API keys, define their type and usage and revoke access at any time to ensure security and control.

Most businesses rely on a maze of systems, from mainframes and SAP to cloud native applications, and you know the pain of making them work together, or not as the case may be. This chaos isn't just inefficient; it's a drag on your agility, a constant source of errors, and a roadblock to true Digital Transformation.

The Hybrid IT Integration Headache
For decades, IT departments relied on separate, siloed automation tools. You had one tool for scheduling batch jobs on the mainframe, another for orchestrating processes in SAP and native operating system tasks, and maybe another for managing your infrastructure-as-code on AWS or Azure.

The result is a complex, fragmented environment characterized by:

• Manual handoffs: Workflows often stall when they need to jump between systems (e.g., waiting for an email notification to trigger the next process on a different platform).
• Siloed visibility: No single pane of glass to see the status of an entire business process from the initial ERP transaction to the final cloud deployment.
• Scheduling latency: Relying strictly on time-of-day scheduling means processes often start too early (wasting resources) or too late (causing delays) because they can’t react instantly to system events.
• Plugin fatigue: Constantly needing to write custom scripts or purchase disparate integration solutions every time a new tool enters the environment.

This fragmentation is why your crucial business processes still feel sluggish and brittle.

The "Universal" Advantage: One Platform to Rule Them All
HCL Universal Orchestrator was designed specifically to eliminate this fragmentation by acting as the single, intelligent control plane for all your automation needs. The name "Universal" isn't a boast; it’s a core philosophy.

HCL UnO doesn't just manage one type of system; it orchestrates your entire enterprise ecosystem.

Mastery Across the Environment
Whether you are executing high-volume financial postings on a traditional platform or managing elastic scaling in a multi-cloud Kubernetes cluster, HCL UnO ties it all together. Two core pillars enable this mastery:

• Massive integration library: HCL UnO features a deep and broad library of native plugins—not just simple connectors—that allow it to interact natively with hundreds of common IT tools. This includes:
  • ERP Systems: SAP, Oracle EBS and JDE.
  • Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud.
  • ITSM/Service Management: ServiceNow, Jira.
  • Legacy and Mainframe Systems: Ensuring that your investments in rock-solid legacy infrastructure remain integral to modern workflows.
• Hybrid environment scope: HCL UnO runs effortlessly across your hybrid landscape, maintaining the same level of control and visibility whether the workload runs on a physical server in your data center, a virtual machine, or a serverless function in the cloud.

Shift from Scheduled to Event-Driven Agility
Perhaps the most significant difference between a legacy scheduler and a modern orchestrator like HCL UnO is the shift from passive, scheduled automation to proactive, event-driven agility.
While HCL UnO can certainly execute jobs at a specific time, its real power lies in its ability to respond instantly to events across your integrated systems.

What is Event-Driven Orchestration?
In an event-driven world, your workflow doesn't wait for the clock; it waits for a signal.

The old way (scheduled): At 10:00 PM, start the data transfer script, even if the required source files aren't ready. (Result: Failure, Rerun, Delay).

The HCL UnO way (event-driven): When a new file lands in the S3 bucket, start the data validation workflow. If the validation is successful, then trigger the SAP posting process and create a success ticket in ServiceNow. (Result: Instantaneous and fully contextual execution).
By making your workflows reactive, you dramatically improve efficiency, reduce latency, and ensure resources are used only when needed. This is the hallmark of modern IT operations.

The Business Value of Centralized Orchestration
For your business, this centralization translates directly into concrete benefits:

• Faster service delivery: Complex business processes spanning multiple systems are executed faster and more reliably.
• Reduced operational risk: Eliminating manual handoffs and relying on proven integration models reduce the risk of human error and minimize service disruptions.
• True end-to-end visibility: You finally get that single pane of glass, allowing you to track the progress and performance of an entire business process from start to finish, regardless of the underlying technology.
• Democratized automation: (As we covered in the first instalment) When integrated with the AI Pilot, even non-specialists can build these powerful, cross-system workflows, freeing up your senior engineers for strategic work.

Endnote
HCL Universal Orchestrator is the unified control plane your business needs to overcome the complexity of siloed, hybrid IT environments. By providing seamless, native integration across every system—from mainframes and ERP to cloud-native apps—HCL UnO ensures that your entire business process is orchestrated end-to-end. Stop relying on fragile, scheduled workflows and embrace HCL UnO’s event-driven agility to accelerate your service delivery and reduce operational risk across the enterprise.
​
Start your free trial today or purchase HCL UnO SaaS directly from the HCL Marketplace and take the first step toward true enterprise agility.

Before the 10.2 era, managing secure communication across a sprawling environment of agents was an intricate, manual, and often fragile process. It required a deep understanding of SSL/TLS, command-line expertise, and a fair amount of luck to ensure that one small misstep didn't leave a fleet of agents isolated and "unreachable." It was a maintenance nightmare that demanded hours of precision work.

The Journey to Simplicity: From Certman to 10.2.6
The transformation began with the introduction of Certman—an important step forward for workload automation security and certificate lifecycle management. It was our first major step toward democratizing security. By providing a dedicated tool for certificate management, we moved away from raw complexity and toward a guided experience, enabling even non-security specialists to maintain a hardened environment.
But we didn't stop there. With the release of version 10.2.6, we have reached a milestone that changes the game entirely: Remote, Centralized Agent Certificate Updates directly from the Orchestration Monitor.

The Power of a Single Click: How it Works
In modern workload automation environments, managing agent certificates centrally is critical to maintaining secure orchestration across distributed infrastructure. Imagine managing your entire security landscape without ever leaving your primary dashboard. In 10.2.6, this is the new reality.
When you navigate to the Orchestration Monitor and select a Dynamic Agent workstation (version 10.2.6+), a new power is at your fingertips under the Actions menu: Update agent certificate.
The process is as elegant as it is powerful:

• Direct Depot Sync: Once triggered, the Dynamic Agent contacts the Primary Domain Manager to fetch a fresh set of certificates directly from the Master Domain Manager’s <data_dir>/ssl/depot folder.
• Seamless Trust: These new certificates automatically replace the old ones in the agent’s local truststore, maintaining a continuous chain of trust without manual file transfers.
• Extending Trust to the Cloud: If your environment relies on external services, you can simply populate a sub-folder on the MDM (<data_dir>/ssl/depot/additionalCAs) with public certificates. The agent will pull these auxiliary CAs during the update, establishing immediate trust for external integrations.

Safety First: The "Self-Healing" Guardrail
In a world of "zero-trust" and high availability, we know that a failed security update can be catastrophic. To prevent agent isolation, we have implemented an Automatic Recovery and Rollback mechanism.

If the agent downloads a certificate that is expired, incorrectly formatted, or fails to establish a connection to the Primary Domain Manager within 5 minutes, it doesn't just fail—it heals. The agent automatically reverts to its previous functional certificates, ensuring your scheduling remains intact while you investigate the issue.

Step-by-Step: Mastering the Update Process
Ready to leave the manual rotation era behind? Orchestrating your certificate updates in WA 10.2.6 is a streamlined process. Here is how you can perform a remote refresh across your environment:
​
1. Access the orchestration monitor: Log in to your Dynamic Workload Console (DWC) and navigate to the Orchestration Monitor dashboard.
2. Filter by workstation: From the object selection menu, choose Workstation as the primary object to monitor.
3. Target your agents: Identify and select the specific Dynamic Agents (running version 10.2.6 or later) that require a certificate refresh.
4. Trigger the update: Click on the More Actions menu and select the newly available action: Update Agent Certificates.

6. Enable the certificate expiration table: Within the Orchestration Monitor, you can customize your view to prioritize security data. Navigate to the Table Configuration settings and enable the Certificate Expiration column.
7. Instant validation: This allows you to immediately visualize the new expiration dates for the certificates just downloaded to your selected agents. This real-time update provides instant peace of mind and proof of compliance without leaving the console.

Monitoring & Troubleshooting
The transparency of this process is absolute. You don't need to dive into the file system of remote servers to verify success. All operation logs and progress updates can be monitored in real time directly through the Operator Messages in the DWC.

This centralized logging ensures that, if the automatic rollback mechanism is triggered, you will immediately see the reason (e.g., a connection timeout or an invalid format) and can act accordingly.

Total Visibility
Security is nothing without verification. To close the loop, administrators can now add the Certificate Expiration column to their Orchestration Monitor table. This provides a real-time, high-level view of your compliance status, allowing you to identify at a glance which agents are due for a "one-click" refresh.

Conclusion: A New Standard of Compliance
The 10.2.6 update represents more than just a new feature; it is a celebration of how far we’ve come. We have turned an "expert-only" nightmare into a streamlined, safe, and centralized operation. By merging automation with security orchestration, we ensure your environment remains compliant with modern standards while significantly reducing your team's operational burden.
​
The nightmare is over. Centralized trust is here.

Enterprises that win in the next decade will not be the ones that automate the most tasks. They will be the ones that orchestrate the most intelligently, coordinating people, systems, and AI agents as one unified operation.

That shift is already underway. And it demands a different kind of platform. 
UnO is the orchestration backbone built for this moment: intelligent, cloud-native, and ready to scale with your AI ambitions.

We are thrilled to announce that HCL Universal Orchestrator (UnO) SaaS is now live. For the first time, organizations can access the full power of UnO's intelligent orchestration platform through a true cloud-native SaaS model with a 30-day free trial, instant provisioning, and the ability to purchase directly online when they are ready.

Three things that make UnO SaaS transformational

THE COLLABORATIVE SAAS PLATFORM
UnO SaaS delivers immediate access to enterprise orchestration—no infrastructure setup, no complex deployment. Your environment is provisioned in minutes, with dedicated workspaces that let teams across every business unit collaborate, configure, and scale at their own pace. For the first time, you can explore the full platform free for 30 days and purchase directly when you are ready.

AGENTIC AI ORCHESTRATION
UnO SaaS enables you to orchestrate AI agents built on CrewAI, Amazon Bedrock, and other leading platforms from a single control plane. The UnO Agentic AI Builder, arriving soon, will let you create and deploy agents directly within UnO without external tooling or specialist resources.

360-DEGREE AGENTIC GOVERNANCE
As AI takes on more of your critical operations, UnO gives you complete command over both user actions and AI agent behaviour from a single interface, with security management and agent monitoring built into the platform from day one. Real-time dashboards arrive in the April release, completing the governance layer. This is governance designed into the architecture itself, giving your compliance, risk, and audit teams the visibility and control they need to trust every action your enterprise takes, whether human or AI.​

Designed for immediate impact
From the moment you register, your environment is provisioned and ready. An automated onboarding sequence guides your team through platform setup, workflow configuration, integration activation, and governance controls at their own pace — with targeted guidance at the midpoint and final week of the trial.
When you are ready to proceed, purchase directly online or engage our team for an enterprise agreement tailored to your scale.

Experience HCL Universal Orchestrator as a service today.
     Start your 30-day free trial

• Quick start guide
• Product documentation

​For any questions on the solution, use cases, or pricing, visit our website HCL Universal Orchestrator or reach out to us.

The conversation around AI and automation has fundamentally changed. When I sat down for a recent executive panel at a CIO day event, the focus was not on if we should automate, but how we orchestrate human expertise and automated intelligence to scale operations in complex environments.

The era of simple Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is ending. We are now in the age of Intelligent Orchestration, where enterprise automation becomes a competitive advantage for agility, not just cost savings.

Here are my perspectives on the major shifts happening right now in enterprise automation, and the strategies leaders must adopt to navigate this transformation, especially focusing on the data sovereignty topic.
​
1. The Evolving Role of Human Judgment: From Replacement to Orchestration
The narrative that AI will replace human decision-making is proving to be fundamentally flawed, especially at scale. Instead, the relationship is moving from one of potential replacement to one of powerful augmentation.
When companies orchestrate operations at scale, human judgment is not eliminated; it is elevated and redirected.

• The AI/Automation Role: Handles the high-volume, repetitive, and pattern-based tasks (e.g., fraud detection, data validation) with unmatched speed and accuracy. This creates what we call a Human-on-the-Loop model.
• The Human Judgment Role: The value of human capital now concentrates on two critical areas:

1. Context and Ethics: Applying nuanced judgment, ethical reasoning, and cultural awareness to complex edge cases and anomalies that fall outside the algorithm's training data. An AI can flag an anomaly; a human must weigh the risk and make a strategic, ethical decision.
2. Strategic Direction and Governance: Humans are essential for training, governing, and setting the strategic direction of the automated systems. Our role is now that of the system architect, designing adaptive workflows that blend AI-driven speed with human accountability.

This orchestration model requires a platform mindset - not point solutions, but an integrated ecosystem that coordinates human expertise, AI agents, and automated processes across the entire value chain. The platform becomes the nervous system of the enterprise, enabling collaborative sense-making at scale.

2. Navigating the Complexities of Scaling Automation
My experience in implementing automation at scale, particularly in complex operational environments, reveals a clear set of challenges and opportunities that move far beyond the initial pilot phase.

3. Advice for Moving to a Coordinated, Intelligent Approach
IT and business leaders who are still stuck with isolated, departmental bots need to shift their strategy to embrace a cohesive, enterprise-wide approach. My advice centers on three key pillars:
I. Shift to a 'Platform-First, Process-Centric' Mindset

• From Tool to Platform: Stop procuring point solutions. Invest in a unified Intelligent Automation Platform that offers end-to-end capabilities: process discovery, AI services, execution, and governance. This is where tools like HCL Universal Orchestrator (UnO) become indispensable. As a cloud-native platform, UnO is designed to centralize the execution of calendar-based, event-driven, and human-in-the-loop tasks across hybrid and multi-cloud environments—effectively dismantling automation silos and streamlining workflows with codeless data exchange. The platform approach enables open architecture integration connecting any tool, any platform, any cloud—without vendor lock-in, while maintaining unified governance and observability across the entire ecosystem.
• Master the Process, Not Just the Task:  Use Process Intelligence and Task Mining to map the true, end-to-end value stream (e.g., Order-to-Cash). Process Intelligence provides deeper insights into process performance, bottlenecks, and optimization opportunities; going beyond simple discovery to enable continuous process improvement. Automating an isolated, inefficient task only digitizes a bad process. You must fix the process first.

II. Build a Business-Led Center of Excellence (CoE)

• Create Fusion Teams: The CoE must be cross-functional. Business Leaders own the process and define the value; IT Leaders own the architecture, security, and scalability. This ensures alignment on value and risk.
• Federate with Governance: Empower business units with low-code/no-code tools to build their own automations, but mandate that all activity flows through the central CoE for security, standardization, and auditability.

III. Embed AI for Adaptive Learning

1. Go Beyond Rules: Integrate AI for cognitive tasks: Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) to handle unstructured data, and Machine Learning to predict and manage exceptions.
2. Build a Continuous Feedback Loop: Design your automation to be self-improving. Automated processes should continuously feed performance data back to the AI models, enabling the platform to learn, self-correct, and adapt to inevitable process drift over time.

4. The Future is Agentic: How to Prepare Today
Looking ahead, I see the future of enterprise automation evolving rapidly into Agentic Process Automation—moving beyond static, sequential logic to intelligent, self-governing workflows.

• The Rise of Agentic AI: The next phase will feature AI agents that can receive a high-level goal (e.g., "Onboard this new customer"), break it into sub-tasks, interact with various systems, make real-time decisions, and escalate exceptions—all with minimal human intervention. Platforms like HCL Universal Orchestrator Agentic are pushing this boundary, leveraging Generative AI to allow users to generate complex workflows from simple natural language prompts while maintaining the enterprise-grade governance and observability required for production deployment, driving us toward truly autonomous workflow management at scale.
• The Preparation Imperatives:

1. The Data Foundation: Agentic AI is only as good as the data it consumes. Companies must prioritize unifying and cleansing their data estate to ensure AI agents have a reliable, single source of truth to act upon.
2. Upskilling for Governance: Focus on developing a workforce that can govern, train, and collaborate with AI. The new core roles are AI Architects, Prompt Engineers, and "Human-in-the-Loop" exception managers.
3. Mandate Governance First: Before deploying self-directing agents, establish robust frameworks for ethics, bias mitigation, auditability, and clear lines of accountability. We must know why an AI agent made a high-stakes decision. Universal orchestrators are key here, as they provide the unified visibility and control necessary to govern these hybrid workflows. This is so critical for data sovereignty and regulatory compliance. In an agentic environment, clear audit trails showing why an AI agent made each decision, what data it accessed, and how it maintains data residency requirements become non-negotiable for enterprise trust.
4. The Orchestration Imperative: As AI agents proliferate across functions (each specialized for specific tasks), the risk of chaos multiplies. Without orchestration, businesses face confusing handoffs, process gaps, duplication, and lack of visibility into agent performance. Universal orchestrators become essential infrastructure, providing the unified control plane to coordinate thousands of agentic interactions while maintaining auditability, governance, and business continuity.

5. The Shifting Automation Priorities: From Cost to Growth
Finally, it’s critical to recognize that enterprise automation priorities have fundamentally shifted beyond cost savings.
While cost reduction remains a clear, measurable benefit, it is no longer the primary strategic driver for leading organizations. The C-suite now views automation as a lever for three higher-value outcomes:

1. Business Resilience and Risk Mitigation: The focus has moved from cutting labor costs to ensuring operational continuity and reducing systemic risk. Automating compliance, fraud detection, and real-time supply chain re-routing ensures the business is anti-fragile.
2. Driving Top-Line Growth and Experience: We are moving from internal efficiency to external impact and talent retention. Automation is used to deliver instant, hyper-personalized customer experiences and to eliminate 'digital drudgery' for employees, boosting morale, innovation, and ultimately, revenue.
3. Process Transformation and Agility (The Competitive Edge): The goal is not to automate the status quo, but to re-engineer the entire value chain for speed. This allows the business to pivot, launch new services, and adapt to market shifts far faster than competitors.

Conclusion
From my perspective, the new mandate is clear: If your automation strategy isn't driving agility, resilience, and growth, it's already an outdated strategy. The scale of transformation we're discussing is exponential, not linear. Traditional job scheduling breaks under today's complexity. We've moved from managing millions of transactions to orchestrating trillions. This isn't just a technical upgrade; it's a fundamental reimagining of how businesses operate at scale. The question is no longer whether to automate, but whether you have the platform architecture to orchestrate intelligence across your entire enterprise ecosystem.

​Why Governance Must Change
Existing governance frameworks assume predictable change and human-centric control. Autonomy breaks this model because decisions become continuous, distributed, and high-volume. Manual review cannot keep up with thousands of relevant events per hour. Agents must operate within guardrails and escalate only when signals are ambiguous. Speed becomes consequential because delays rapidly amplify misconfigurations, security anomalies, or supply issues. Autonomy already exists in CI/CD, security, scaling, and routing; the gap lies in structuring and governing what is already happening rather than attempting to slow it down.

The Core of Agentic Governance
Agentic governance shifts focus from controlling steps to controlling behaviour. Leadership defines intent and the boundaries within which systems may act, supported by an enforceable governance control plane.
Its foundations are clear:

• outcomes that matter
• constraints that must be respected, implemented through guardrails
• visibility of decisions, enabling trust and auditability

Any component that perceives, decides, and acts requires governance. The goal is distributed autonomy aligned to enterprise intent, operating within safe and transparent limits.

Governing Decisions at Scale
To govern autonomy effectively, four capabilities matter.
1. Define intent rather than instructions.
Explicit outcomes prevent agents from optimising for local logic. Constraints and guardrails express what must hold true without prescribing every action.
2. Allocate autonomy deliberately.
Not every domain benefits equally. Time-critical areas like incident response need more autonomy; high-accountability areas like financial controls need less. Autonomy becomes a calibrated setting, not a binary choice.
3. Ensure every decision is observable.
Decision trails explain what happened and why. This supports regulatory expectations, internal trust, and operational assurance.
4. Design for safe failure.
Autonomy changes how errors propagate. Agents need clear escalation paths and predictable failure modes so ambiguous signals default to safety.

Together, these capabilities turn governance from reactive oversight into proactive system design.

How Operations Change Under Agentic Governance
When autonomy operates within guardrails, decision cycles accelerate because routine approvals disappear. Teams act at the pace of signals, intervening only where consequences are uncertain. Continuous monitoring surfaces anomalies sooner, preventing compounding failures. Agents manage predictable cases while humans focus on ambiguity and trade-offs. Cross-domain coordination improves as agents share signals, reducing friction and shortening the path from event to outcome.
The result is speed with alignment: autonomy that strengthens control rather than weakening it.

Why It Matters to CIOs and CTOs
​CIOs and CTOs are accountable for cost, reliability, security, and compliance. Agentic governance supports these obligations by enabling rapid decisions without sacrificing oversight. Guardrails clarify boundaries. Decision logs scale accountability. Distributed autonomy handles complexity better than centralised manual processes. Humans retain authority where regulation, ambiguity, or strategic impact require judgment.
Avoiding this shift leads to predictable consequences: fragmented automation, rising opacity, and loss of leadership visibility.

Strategic Value
The operational benefits compound into a structural advantage. Agents lower the cost of control by handling routine checks. They accelerate incident response, reduce regulatory risk through inherent logging, and preserve resilience by embedding expertise into systems. Clear guardrails reduce rework and accelerate innovation.

Autonomy Is Already Here
Autonomous systems are operating in production today. Governing them with manual process tools is unsustainable. Agentic governance provides a model for defining intent, structuring autonomy, ensuring transparency, and designing safe failure. The reward is speed and resilience. The penalty for delay is uncertainty and erosion of trust.

Leaders must choose whether they will govern autonomy or be governed by it.

Zero Downtime Check: After running this, notice that your dynamic agents continue communicating with the server because they already trust the new CA (from Step 3)! Only the MDM's client connection and Composer will temporarily lose connectivity.

Step 5: Update the Master Agent's Client Certificate
The Master Domain Manager (MDM) has its own local agent that also needs to trust the new CA. We simply re-run the AgentCertificateDownloader locally.
Run the exact same command from Step 3, but on the MDM machine itself:AgentCertificateDownloader --wauser <wauser> --wapassword <wauserPwd> --tdwbhostname <server_ip> --tdwbport 31116 --work_dir <work_dir>
This updates the MDM's local agent client configuration, restoring its full communication with its own server component.
Step 6: Connect the DWC to the Secure Engine
The final step is to ensure your Dynamic Workload Console (DWC) trusts the new server certificate so you can log in without certificate errors.
From the DWC machine, use Certman to import the new server certificate directly from the engine URL:
./certman import -url <waserverIP:waserverPort> -storepasswd <dwcStorePassword>