Hi Mauricio,
Don't worry - your answer was clear - it's because I'm new to a lot of the technologies surrounding jBPM and as a result I am probably asking a lot of naive and quite dumb questions!
I can see what you're saying about the info being application specific. In this case I'm not writing an app of my own, the app is jbpm-console and the user security is the default login process that comes with the 5.4.0.Final installation. My assumption was that with the user already logged in and the creation of new process instances being managed by jbpm-consle that it would be relatively easy to access the user's name. If I understand correctly, as jbpm-console is a web application then I should be able to do that by accessing the session info (although that's another learning curve I'll be sitting at the bottom of! :) ).
Thanks again - I do appreciate it,
Andy McC