"The work item currently has access to the process instance id, so you could just retrieve the process instance from the session and find the node instance that references this work item."
That actually gives me a good workaround.
Re decoupling, in this case I was more interested in the node id rather than the process instance or node instance id.
I think it will be useful to expose this in the base class or as a utility method. Should I go ahead and file a JIRA for this? Can also put out a patch for it..
Thanks