Techniques are presented for managing execution of processes on a data
processing system. The data processing system comprises process instances
that are each an execution of a corresponding process. Each process
instance comprises activity instances. Business impacts are determined
for the process instances, the activity instances, or both. Order of
execution of the activity instances is managed by allocating resources to
activity instances in order to achieve an objective defined in terms of
the business impacts. In another embodiment, requests are received for
the execution of the processes. For a given request, one or more of the
operations of assigning, updating, aggregating, and weighting of first
business impacts associated with the given request are performed to
create second business impacts associated with the given request.
Additionally, requests can be modified. Modification can include changing
the process requested or process input as deemed appropriate, combining
related requests into a single request, or both. Unmodified requests and
any modified requests are managed.