Learn how Pega Task Mining helps you gain objective, task-level insight into how your organization performs work.
Pega Task Mining is a cloud-hosted application that you can deploy in Pega Cloud® 3 for a secure, scalable foundation.
Pega Task Mining helps you to better understand how your people, processes, and technology work together to serve your customers. Use it to quantify effort and friction, understand variation, and identify optimization and automation opportunities, especially when traditional system event logs are incomplete or unavailable.
Barriers to task analysis
Organizations use task analysis to make informed decisions that improve productivity, reduce associate burnout, and support consistent, high-quality outcomes. However, complex work environments, which are often shaped by fragmented tools, legacy systems, and rising customer expectations, make effective task analysis difficult.
Although many organizations invest in process improvement initiatives, traditional approaches often rely on assumptions, interviews, or incomplete system data. Without reliable system-generated data, it is difficult to reconstruct end-to-end workflows or understand variation at the task level. As a result, in legacy and hybrid environments, the absence of reliable event logs becomes a significant barrier to effective task analysis.
Without a clear view of how work is actually performed, organizations struggle to identify inefficiencies, overlook automation opportunities, and find it difficult to sustain transformation efforts.
Data collection
Pega Task Mining addresses these challenges with a data‑-driven, human-centered approach to understanding how work truly gets done. By capturing task-level activity directly from the desktop, Pega Task Mining helps organizations to analyze real user behavior at scale and identify optimization and automation opportunities, even when traditional process data is unavailable.
To provide visibility into the daily work life of associates, a lightweight Desktop Runtime on each associate’s desktop captures data as associates complete work. For this reason, associates are also often referred to as data collectors. Common data captured falls into the following categories:
- Interaction data
- The following interaction data helps to quantify effort, friction, and
repetitive patterns:
- Total mouse clicks
- Total key presses
- Error keypresses (Backspace key and Delete key)
- Scroll actions with the mouse wheel or trackpad
- Cut, copy, and paste actions (Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, and Ctrl+V key presses)
- Task flow data
- The following task flow data helps to identify potential process
breakdowns and also best practices:
- Applications accessed
- Screens accessed (if enabled)
- Start and end of a task with task overlays (if configured)
- Idle time
Desktop Runtime captures data continuously across applications and screens, providing insight that is updated hourly into how work gets done without relying on event logs.
Privacy and security
Desktop Runtime does not capture screenshots, screen recordings, or the contents of on-screen fields, such as typed text or field values. Instead, it collects structured interaction signals that describe how work is performed without recording what is shown on the screen. For example, Desktop Runtime captures application names or screen titles, not visual images or field-level data. All data is transmitted securely and sensitive data can be masked, anonymized, or filtered before ingestion, including screen titles or identifiers.
Based on the client configuration, organizations retain control over what data is collected and how it is used, supporting internal privacy, compliance, and workforce governance requirements. This approach allows organizations to understand effort, friction, and task flow without exposing sensitive information or monitoring individual behavior at a content level.
Data enrichment
- Define the business unit hierarchy so that users can only view the departments and teams to which they have access
- Add data collectors (associates who have Desktop Runtime installed), as needed. Some organizations, such as those in Citrix environments, might choose to use standard desktop deployment packages.
- Categorize applications as Production, Other Work, and Non Work to enable more meaningful task scoring
- Create user-friendly application aliases for application executable names, making it easier to recognize applications
- Define screen rules to refine, condense, and consolidate the display of screen details data
- Add task tags to applications and screens to define the start and end of tasks
- Add opportunity tags to applications to detect opportunities, such as reducing the use of legacy applications
Accessing Pega Task Mining
Pega Task Mining is available with or without Pega Process Mining. If you have both applications, you can access each from the same application interface, making it easy to go back and forth between them.
Users run a Pega Task Mining View, as shown in the following figure:
- Highlight the impact of friction on your teams
- See the common patterns of work across associates and target the automations that will have the biggest impact.
- Get a true picture of what "good" looks like
- Capture the behaviors behind your strongest team workflows and share best practices.
- Move beyond manual spot checks
- See holistic data updated hourly from across your teams to make better decisions that save your business time and money.
Putting it all together
This diagram illustrates how data flows from associate desktops to the Pega Task Mining portal, where analysis begins on the Opportunities page.
