On Enterprise Architecture Patterns: A Systematic Literature Review

Roberto Rafael Garc

ıa-Escall

and Adina Aldea

Master Business Information Technology, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

Industrial Engineering and Business Information Systems, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

Keywords:

Enterprise Architecture Patterns, Enterprise Architecture.

Abstract:

Organizations around the world today face many challenges, and not all of them are unique. Such repeatable

problems can themselves be solved by reusable solutions. This study focuses on Enterprise Architecture

Patterns, reusable solutions to repeating challenges organizations face. Through a systematic literature review,

we aim to gather an exhaustive recollection of all such patterns in literature. In order to be as comprehensive as

possible, the sample included related ﬁelds also researching patterns. The result is a collection of 593 patterns

and their respective analysis, which will help practitioners tackle their challenges.

1 INTRODUCTION

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a relatively new ﬁeld

of research that aims to align the objectives of the

different areas of an organization (Lankhorst, 2017).

Practitioners of this ﬁeld have many frameworks and

methods at their disposal, such as the Zachman frame-

work and The Open Group Architecture Framework

(TOGAF), among others (Zachman, 1987; The Open

Group, 2018). Most of these methodologies and

frameworks describe ways of representing the orga-

nization in order to analyze how it is working at the

moment and how it should be working in the future

(Lankhorst et al., 2009). Organizations are very dif-

ferent from one another but have similarities in their

inner workings. Similarities that could also be called

patterns.

The deﬁnition of patterns comes from Christian

Alexander, the author of the book ”A Pattern Lan-

guage” (Alexander et al., 1977). It is used as the base

deﬁnition for patterns in multiple ﬁelds, it builds upon

four key attributes. First, patterns are a solution to a

recurring problem. Second, the pattern is the core of

the solution, meaning the solution has a scope, and

does not aim to describe anything that is not needed

to solve the problem. Third, the pattern should be us-

able as many times as needed. And fourth, each spe-

ciﬁc use of the pattern might look different than the

last.

Patterns in the case of Alexander et al. (1977) re-

fer to patterns in architecture, but the concept has been

applied to other ﬁelds as well. One of the ﬁelds using

patterns is Computer Science, where they are used as

a standardized solution that can be reused in multi-

ple cases, an approach that has become a best prac-

tice to solving problems in the ﬁeld (Gamma and al,

1995). An example is the Facade pattern that deﬁnes

a central interface of access acting as a front to a com-

plex structure, simplifying the access (Gamma and al,

1995).

Applying patterns to EA would entail that prac-

titioners document both recurring problems and the

solutions they use to solve them within their orga-

nizations. This documentation would help future or-

ganizations explore alternative conﬁgurations to their

current way of operation, as well as inspire what di-

rection to move to in their future. This approach is

mentioned as best practice in the TOGAF, so it is

not a new idea, however the execution of the prac-

tice is left to the readers (The Open Group, 2018). By

having similarities in their functioning, organizations

could reuse solutions to the challenges they face of-

ten. However, today using publicly available patterns

for EA is not a widespread practice. Stemming ﬁrst

from a lack of said public patterns. Thus a ﬁrst step

towards popularizing pattern use is to identify them

and their sources.

The goal of this study is to answer the research

question “What is the state of the literature of En-

terprise Architecture Patterns?” by performing a Sys-

tematic Literature Review (SLR), leveraging multi-

ple databases. Furthermore, this study gathers EA

patterns and identiﬁes ﬁelds related to EA that can

serve as sources patterns. In order to gather a holis-

666

García-Escallón, R. and Aldea, A.

On Enterprise Architecture Patterns: A Systematic Literature Review.

DOI: 10.5220/0009392306660678

In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2020) - Volume 2, pages 666-678

ISBN: 978-989-758-423-7

tic view, and as complete a list of patterns as possi-

ble, the query was executed over the full text of the

articles, instead of the more popular Title-Abstract-

Keywords. This scope was set aiming for discovering

what other ﬁelds related to EA are researching pat-

terns. Such ﬁelds were later found to be: Business

Model Innovation (BMI), Business Process Manage-

ment (BPM), and Information Technology Service

Management (ITSM).

The contribution to the ﬁeld is an exhaustive re-

view of EA patterns found in the literature, as well

as identifying more ﬁelds of research that serve as

sources of such patterns. Also, it paves the way for a

centralized repository of patterns from multiple ﬁelds

of research, to be used and applied by Enterprise Ar-

chitects in the ﬁeld. Such a set of patterns could be

used to enhance current EA tools. Imagine an archi-

tect using an EA modelling tool, while deﬁning a new

Business Process they could choose how applications

support it based on the patterns by

sa and Krisper

(2011) (P12 in the sample). The same way patterns

in Computer Science helped tool vendors to offer as-

sistants to expedite the tasks, e.g. automatically ap-

plying patterns like the Factory Method as software

developers are working (Gamma and al, 1995).

The rest of the article is organized as follows: in

section 2 the methodology used is presented, then in

section 3 the results of the SLR are shown, then in sec-

tion 4 the ﬁndings are discussed, and ﬁnally in section

5 the conclusions are drawn.

2 METHODOLOGY

In order to achieve the study’s goal the SLR method-

ology of Rouhani et al. (2015) is used, as it is a very

thorough work in the EA ﬁeld. The method they used

is ﬁrst introduced by Kitchenham and Charters (2007)

a guideline for Software Engineering, but was mod-

iﬁed for its’ use in EA. This method outlines three

stages to a SLR: a planning phase, an execution phase

and a result analysis phase. In order to enhance this

method, some techniques described by Wolfswinkel

et al. (2013) will be included, speciﬁcally, the back-

wards and forwards citation steps of their selection

phase to detect any work that builds upon patterns that

was not present as results of the query, to include ad-

ditional articles that might be relevant but were not

present in the results of the query. In order to exe-

cute this last step, Google Scholar was used, which

shows both, backward and forward citations, easily.

The process is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Overall Process of the SLR.

2.1 Design Phase

In this phase the design process followed to perform

the SLR according to the chosen methodology is pre-

sented.

2.1.1 Research Question

Identifying patterns, and then apply them to subse-

quent work is a generalized human practice, this re-

search aims to identify what patterns there have been

researched in the EA ﬁeld. The expectation was to

ﬁnd a list of patterns that could be used to answer

some of the challenges today’s organizations face. As

such, the main Research Question (RQ) to answer fol-

lows below. In order to best answer it subsequent four

Sub-questions (SQ) were deﬁned.

RQ: What is the state of the literature of EA Pat-

terns?

SQ1: What patterns are present in the sample?

SQ2: What other ﬁelds of research are present in

the sample?

SQ3: What ways of representing patterns are

used?

SQ4: What methodologies are used for pattern ex-

traction?

By identifying other ﬁelds that are related to EA in

their text the list of patterns will be expanded beyond

the ones found strictly in the EA ﬁeld. This would

serve to classify the patterns found based on which

ﬁeld it comes from. The expectation is to ﬁnd ﬁelds

that are related to EA, in a way that the patterns found

can be used by EA practitioners in the future.

In order to compare the patterns found informa-

tion regarding how these patterns are represented is

gathered. The expectation is to ﬁnd studies using

standard modeling languages like Archimate, UML,

BPMN; as well as strictly written descriptions, among

others.

In order to compare the studies themselves the

methods used to extract the patterns will be gathered.

In other words, how did the authors produce the pat-

tern. The expectation is to ﬁnd that studies used a mix

of methods, e.g. systematic literature review.

On Enterprise Architecture Patterns: A Systematic Literature Review

667

2.1.2 Search Process

In this section the process followed in the SLR is de-

scribed. These are the steps previous to the actual exe-

cution of the review. First, the keywords to be used in

the queries were selected : (“enterprise architecture”

AND “Pattern”)

The aim of this query is to produce a sample of

the literature, in order to then answer the RQs. This

query was executed with the scope of the full body

of articles instead of the more popular Title-Abstract-

Keywords, in order to widen the variety of articles in

the resulting sample. With these keywords at hand the

databases to apply them to were selected:

• Scopus.

• ACM Digital Library.

• IEEE Xplore.

• Science Direct - Elsevier.

• Springer Link.

• Taylor and Francis.

• Web of science.

Using the Google Scholar database in the design was

decided against, due to it containing results that are

already present in all the databases above (Rouhani

et al., 2015). However, due to the simplicity by which

one is able to ﬁnd speciﬁc articles, information about

the references of articles and the articles that cite

them, Google Scholar was used for the forward and

backward citation gathering.

In accordance with the methodology selected

(Rouhani et al., 2015), inclusion criteria is designed to

produce a sample of studies that would best serve the

goal of this study. In order to ensure recent scientiﬁc

research as well as relevant patterns to today’s chal-

lenges, articles published in the past 10 years were

selected. To ensure scientiﬁc rigor studies published

in journals and conference proceedings were selected,

furthermore indexed books were also included be-

cause after an exploratory phase it was found that

there were several books published containing repos-

itories of patterns. For an international scope the

search was limited to studies written in English. Fi-

nally, only articles referring to patterns were selected,

in order to be able to answer the RQs. Inclusion Cri-

teria:

• Peer-reviewed papers published in journals, con-

ference proceedings, book chapters and books

• Published in the last decade

• Written in English

• Studies that focus on Patterns

In terms of the exclusion criteria to ensure scientiﬁc

rigor short works, and non-studies (e.g. introduc-

tory texts) were excluded. In order to automate the

gathering of bibliographic information articles with-

out a DOI registry were excluded. Finally, to simplify

the answering of the RQ, studies focusing on anti-

patterns and patterns referring to Software were ex-

cluded. The ﬁrst due to the goal of compiling reusable

solutions to common problems organizations face in-

stead of things they should not do; the latter due to

their narrow scope of how to program better software.

Exclusion criteria:

• Short works, e.g. posters

• Duplicated work, unifying under the database

with more results

• non-studies, e.g. Introduction texts to conference

proceedings

• Articles without a DOI registry

• Articles referring to anti-patterns

• Articles referring to Software Architecture, or

Software Patterns

Once the results were extracted from all the databases,

the steps below were followed:

1. Eliminate all duplicates.

2. Based on the title whether exclusion criteria apply.

3. Based on the title and abstract select those articles

where both inclusion criteria apply, and exclusion

criteria don’t apply.

4. Repeat step 3 but reading through the full text.

5. For each remaining article review the reference

section and repeat steps 1 to 4, relaxing the ”Arti-

cles without a DOI” criterion.

6. For each remaining article use Google Scholar to

review the forward citations and repeat steps 1 to

2.2 Execution Phase

In this phase the process and results of the execution

phase of this SLR is explained. As deﬁned during

the design phase, the steps were followed and criteria

deﬁned was applied. First, a description of our expe-

rience executing the deﬁned steps is given. Second,

the form used to extract the useful information of the

studies is shown.

2.2.1 Query - Enterprise Architecture Patterns

As shown in Table 1, the initial results of the query

included 7669 non-unique items. After removing du-

plicates and those without DOI registry the sample

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Table 1: Results of Query.

Database # of

results

Scopus 2071

The ACM Guide to Computing Litera-

ture

IEEE Xplore 1174

Science Direct 609

Springer Link 2746

Taylor and Francis 125

Web of Science 42

TOTAL 7669

size was reduced to 3236 articles. Those studies were

then ﬁltered by reading their titles and based on the

exclusion criteria, resulting in 556 studies. Then the

abstracts were read and those studies that referred to

patterns were selected, this reduced the sample size

to 33 articles. These were further reﬁned to 16 stud-

ies based on their full text. From these 16 studies

both forward and backward citations were gathered,

which were then ﬁltered based on their contents and

more relaxed criteria. Thanks to the relaxed criteria

it was possible to include reports and websites. The

result was the ﬁnal sample of 24 studies, as seen in

Appendix A.

2.2.2 Data Extraction

In this section the data extraction form, that facili-

tates the gathering of the information present in the

selected studies, is introduced. In 2 the information

gathered from each study is shown. This information

serves as the basis upon which answers to the RQs are

drawn. Separately, for each pattern presented in the

studies the information shown in Table 3 was gath-

ered.

2.2.3 Synthesis

The ﬁnal sample of studies contained 24 items, of

which 11 are journal articles, 8 are conference pa-

pers and 2 are books, as shown in Table 4. While

in Table 5 each study, their year of publication, what

type study they were, as well as their number of ci-

tations is shown. The highest cited works were the

2011 book Architecture and Patterns for IT Service

Management, Resource Planning, and Governance:

Making Shoes for the Cobbler’s Children with 82,

and 2009’s conference paper Using enterprise archi-

tecture management patterns to complement TOGAF

with 76. A special note must be made regarding the

2019 journal article A Review and Typology of Cir-

cular Economy Business Model Patterns that within

a short period of time has gathered 48 citations (P2).

Although the number of citations has many contin-

gencies it can be used to draw some comparisons. E.g.

when comparing two articles of the same type the one

with higher citations has informed a wider opinion

than the article with a lower citation count.

Seven articles in the sample have been cited by

less than 10 times, ﬁve of them conference proceed-

ings and two journal articles, and three of them pub-

lished in the last year. On the other hand, the other

17 studies in the sample have been cited between 10

and 82 times. In the sample the years 2009, 2011 and

2015 are the publication years for the biggest concen-

tration of studies.

3 RESULTS

After the selection of the ﬁnal sample and the subse-

quent extraction of the data the contents of the studies

are explored. This section presents the ﬁndings and

discussion of this review, as well as a narration of the

challenges faced, and exploration done throughout the

process.

In order to better present the results they will

be aggregated based on the ﬁelds found in the sam-

ple. The ﬁelds found in the sample were: EA, BMI,

BPM and ITSM. Each ﬁeld will be explored deeper

in the following subsections. There are two excep-

tions to this classiﬁcation, studies P16 and P18. The

ﬁrst focuses on digital recruitment patterns for orga-

nizations, the latter focuses on change management

for SMEs. This exclusion is based on their different

ﬁelds, and low number (4) of patterns exposed, al-

though they are present in the sample and resulting

Pattern database (Appendix A and Appendix B)

3.1 Enterprise Architecture

In the EA ﬁeld the focus on patterns has been split

between patterns of enterprises, and patterns of the

EA practice itself. The latter has been spearheaded

by a group of researchers in the TUM who have been

working on such patterns and concluded their work

with the version 2 of their pattern catalog in 2015,

codiﬁed as P10 in this work. This team of researchers

are also responsible for P9, P15, P19 and P23, which

represents 20% of our sample.

In Table 6 each study of the EA ﬁeld found in the

sample is shown. As mentioned before, P9, P10, P15,

P19 and P23 focus on the management of EA as a

practice. These Enterprise Architecture Management

(EAM) patterns total 34 out of the 111 patterns. All

other works focus on the Enterprise as a whole. The

On Enterprise Architecture Patterns: A Systematic Literature Review

669

Table 2: Data Extraction Form - Article.

No. Extracted Data Description

1 Bibliographic Information

of the study

Information on the Authors, year of publication, medium of publication

and any publication ID (DOI, ISSBN, etc)

2 Times cited As mentioned above, Google Scholar was used to gather how many

times each study was cited

3 Type of document Journal, Conference proceedings, published book, Lecture Notes, dis-

sertation

4 Research Method No method, case study, survey, interviews, experiment, literature review

5 Scope of patterns presented The patterns can be of a segment of the architecture, e.g. Business

layer, Strategy layer, etc. It could also be cross-layer but in the scope of

a function, e.g. HR.

6 Field of origin for the pat-

tern presented

Where the pattern comes from, i.e. the ﬁeld of research that prompted

the pattern

7 Language of representation A formal modelling language (e.g. Archimate), representation for-

malisms (i.e. a Framework), a non-standard modelling language (boxes

and lines), written description

8 Number of Patterns pre-

sented

How many patterns are presented in the article

9 Validation of the patterns No validation, conceptual validation, expert panel, etc.

Table 3: Data Extraction Form - Pattern.

No. Extracted

Data

Description

1 Id An identiﬁer

2 Name Name of the pattern as written

in the article

3 Description Description, or summary of

the pattern as written in the ar-

ticle

4 Source Which article it appeared on,

could be possible that multi-

ple articles refer to the same

pattern by name

5 Publication

year

What year was the pattern

published on

6 Field of

origin

From which ﬁeld does the pat-

tern come from

7 Scope The patterns can be of a seg-

ment of the architecture, e.g.

Business layer, Strategy layer,

etc. It could also be cross-

layer but in the scope of a

function, e.g. HR.

publication year was also shown, where it can be seen

that most of the works in the sample are from 2009

(44%), barely inside the scope of the SLR. Among

these studies the one with most citations is P12 where

32 patterns are deﬁned, dealing with every degree of

application support on Business Processes. E.g. a

business process is entirely supported by an applica-

tion, or a business process having no application sup-

Table 4: Studies by Type.

Study type Number of study

book 2

Book Section 1

Conference Paper 8

Journal Article 11

Report 1

Website 1

Total general 24

porting it.

These studies base most of their patterns on their

own experiences as experts in the ﬁeld, which is clas-

siﬁed as No Method. Except for P13 which performed

a literature review in order to gather the patterns they

presented.

Finally, in terms of means of representation all the

works focusing on EAM have followed the same for-

mat. Which is understandable, as they’re outcomes of

the same research group. Other studies use Archimate

and a written description (P4, P12). Where the writ-

ten description contains a summary of the solution,

an example of it, with P4 also explaining the problem

the pattern solves. P13 uses only a written description

and P14 uses multiple diagramming languages (UML,

BPMN, Archimate) as well as written description of

the context, problem and solution.

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Table 5: Studies by Year of Publication and Citations.

ID Study Type Publication

Year

Number

of cita-

tions

ID Study Type Publication

Year

Number

of cita-

tions

P1 Journal Article 2018 3 P13 Journal Article 2009 17

P2 Journal Article 2019 48 P14 Book 2014 29

P3 Conference Paper 2010 11 P15 Conference Paper 2015 5

P4 Book Section 2019 0 P16 Conference Paper 2015 2

P5 Book 2011 82 P17 Conference Paper 2010 0

P6 Journal Article 2015 51 P18 Conference Paper 2011 1

P7 Journal Article 2019 0 P19 Journal Article 2009 42

P8 Conference Paper 2016 13 P20 Journal Article 2017 59

P9 Journal Article 2009 14 P21 Journal Article 2018 28

P10 Report 2015 0 P22 Conference Paper 2013 30

P11 Journal Article 2011 43 P23 Conference Paper 2009 76

P12 Journal Article 2011 52 P24 Website 2011 47

Table 6: EA Studies and Patterns.

ID Research

Method

Publication

Year

Patterns Citation

Count

P4 No

Method

2019 4 0

P9 No

Method

2009 3 14

P10 No

Method

2015 23 0

P12 No

Method

2011 32 52

P13 Literature

review

2009 28 17

P14 No

Method

2014 13 29

P15 No

Method

2015 2 5

P19 No

Method

2009 6 42

P23 No

Method

2009 0 76

Total 111 235

3.2 Business Model Innovation

The patterns found coming from the BMI ﬁeld focus

on describing the Business Model, where frameworks

like the Business Model Canvas and its’ constructs

are popular in our sample (Osterwalder and Pigneur,

2010). These constructs include revenue stream and

customers. Another interesting ﬁnding is the research

on Business Models from the Sustainable Business

Development ﬁeld, which focus on evaluating what

types Business Models are sustainable (P2, P7, P21).

For example, P2 focuses in the sub-ﬁeld of Circular

Economy Business Development.

As can be seen in Table 7 the primary pattern pub-

lication is P20 in 2017, that gathered multiple repos-

Table 7: Business Model Studies and Patterns.

ID Research

Method

Publication

Year

Patterns Citation

count

P1 Systematic

literature

review

2018 30 3

P2 Literature

review

2019 6 48

P6 Market

research

2015 27 51

P7 Case

studies

2019 7 0

P8 Market

research

2016 27 13

P20 Literature

review

2017 176 59

P21 Literature

review

2018 45 28

Total 318 202

itories in the ﬁeld from previous work and consoli-

dated it. P20 has more than 176 Business Model Pat-

terns, which prompted others to follow and expand

on, further extending the number of patterns. It has

also served the sustainable business development ﬁeld

as a basis for their own work, both for them to ex-

pand the repository (P2) as well as evaluate the pat-

terns through sustainability research (P21).

In Table 7 it can be seen that all publications hap-

pened in the past four years. With the ones focusing

on sustainability being even more recent.

For research methods, these studies leveraged the

existing literature, in the form of reviews, as a source

for the patterns presented (57%). Those that deviated

from the literature went instead to the market and an-

alyzed how real-world organizations operate.

Finally, the means of representation they used was

heterogeneous. P1 uses the Business Model Canvas as

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671

presented by Osterwalder and Pigneur (Osterwalder

and Pigneur, 2010). P2 develops a morphology based

on the Business Model Canvas. P6 uses a framework

developed by K

oster (2013) which mainly presents

the constructs deﬁned by the Business Model Canvas

in four categories: Supply model, Customer model,

Value creation model, and ﬁnancial model. P7 uses

only written descriptions of the solutions. P8 uses the

template deﬁned by Weil et al. (Weill et al., 2005)

where each pattern has a name, a short description

and a real-world organization that uses it. P20 com-

piles a table with pattern name, description, alterna-

tive names, example of the real-world and its’ source

study. P21 used a template based on the one presented

by Alexander et al. (1977) with written descriptions

of the problem and the repeatable solution. Except

for P7 that uses only written descriptions and P21 that

uses a proper pattern representation, all articles from

this ﬁeld can be split by similarity into two groups:

the ones that use the constructs from the Business

Model Canvas or similar (P1, P2, P6), the ones that

compiled a table with minimal information (P8, P20).

3.3 Business Process Management

The BPM ﬁeld had their own primary publication in

2011 with P24 where the authors have been working

through multiple articles and publishing their work

in web format. Their work is publicly accessible

through their website which makes it easy for other

researchers to use it for future work, something that

shows in their citation count. They aim to be exhaus-

tive in their work, and it shows, as their repository

now contains 127 patterns for Business Process Mod-

eling. However, no recent articles were found other

than the publication of a book gathering their ﬁndings

in 2016 (Russell et al., 2016). They use a colored petri

net to represent their patterns in diagrams, along with

a written description of the solution. As a source for

their patterns they leverage their own expertise.

The other work from this ﬁeld in our sample

was P11 in 2011, using an abstract representation of

an enterprise based on the most essential processes.

They use written descriptions and diagrams written in

ANSI/IEEE 1471-2000. They have based their pat-

terns on their own experience and have seen them ap-

plied to many organizations in Chile.

3.4 IT Service Management

The articles from the ITSM ﬁeld that were in the ﬁnal

sample were clearly split on either conference papers

or a book, where the book (P5) has the highest cita-

tion count out of the entire sample. The conference

papers (P3, P17 and P22) only documented 10 pat-

terns among them, however they hinted at a technical

report by the same authors that was not possible to

acquire. It must be mentioned that the authors were

unable to access P5 in its’ current 2nd edition, instead

only the 1st edition from 2007 was analysed.

Table 8: ITSM Studies and Patterns.

ID Research

Method

Publication

Year

Patterns Citation

count

P3 No

Method

2010 6 11

P5 No

Method

2011 19 82

P17 No

Method

2010 1 0

P22 No

Method

2013 3 30

Total 29 123

As for means of representation, As can be seen in Ta-

ble 8 all of the studies in this ﬁeld base their patterns

on experience. With the special mention of P22 which

translates the ITIL standard into Archimate concepts.

P17 and P3 use a template that is based on Alexan-

der et al. (1977) and describes a context, a problem,

the forces that foster the use of a pattern, the solu-

tion itself, its’ consequences and some facts to help

the understanding and usage of the solution, for ex-

ample depending on the number of systems managed

in a remote location the use of a single distributor may

not be enough. The patterns are accompanied by dia-

grams made using a non-standard modelling language

and UML. Both works refer to a research group that

has published a technical report with a more complete

collection of patterns, but the report was inaccessible

to the authors of this paper. Finally, P5 uses written

descriptions without following a speciﬁc template like

other studies in the sample, as well as with UML and

non-standard diagrams.

4 DISCUSSION

In this section, the results of the SLR and overall ﬁnd-

ings are shown. This section also contains the discus-

sion on the Research Questions. Finally, its’ limita-

tions and possible future work are discussed.

4.1 General Discussion

During the overall execution of the SLR it was no-

ticed that the concept of patterns has been used by all

ﬁelds in the sample with different time spans. In Fig-

ure 2 it can be seen how each of the ﬁelds has peaks

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Figure 2: Patterns per Year and Field.

in different years. The latest one being the studies on

BMI, particularly in the Sustainable Business Devel-

opment ﬁeld. The recent surge of the BMI ﬁeld’s ef-

fort on documenting the patterns has been welcomed

with open arms by the academic community, as seen

by the citation count mentioned in earlier sections.

Such interest extends to the sub-ﬁeld of Sustainable

Business Models, that expands the Business Model

Patterns. P2 which expands upon the Repository and

adds more Business Model Patterns. Contrary to all

other studies in this sample, all the studies related to

BMI, SBM and Circular Economy are based around

the framework proposed by Osterwalder and Pigneur

(Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010). Although the rep-

resentation of the patterns may differ, their basic con-

structs are the same, which would make it possible to

translate these patterns into an EA representation of

them, based on the work of Iacob et al. (2014). This

method would pave the way to take these Business

Model Patterns repositories into EA Patterns. Be-

ing able to relate the patterns extracted from Sustain-

able Business Models and translating them to EA is

aligned with the overall interest of society to a more

sustainable world. With the call for sustainability, as

seen by the Sustainable Development Goals of the

UN (United Nations, 2015), it means that organiza-

tions will need to develop new functions or transform

their current ones. This change could be supported

by EA, and, being a generalized need, would beneﬁt

from having a repository of patterns to draw from.

4.2 State of the Literature on

Enterprise Architecture Patterns

Each of the 24 studies reviewed in this SLR have de-

scribed patterns, however not all of them seem to be

written in a way that can be used by future works.

For example in the conference proceedings and jour-

nal articles, where the authors report mostly on how

they arrived at the patterns (P3, P17), or describes

how one could extract and write patterns (P16, P22),

but do very little in actually documenting them. As

such, when extracting the information, which in Sec-

tion 2.2.2 we deﬁned as name and description, there

are some patterns without a description as well as

some where it was difﬁcult even to gather the names

of. This lack of information may be related to the

space limitations when submitting studies for publi-

cation in conferences or journals. Which is aligned

with our ﬁndings that the most detailed and complete

patterns are found in books, technical reports and on-

line databases.

With space being such a valuable resource in jour-

nal articles and conference papers it raises the ques-

tion what is the best way to gather patterns in a way

that is usable for future research as well as practition-

ers. Within this SLR, books and technical reports fo-

cused more on the patterns themselves, while journal

articles and conference proceedings focused more on

methods or presented sample patterns. Although P24

fused the two, by publishing each new kind of pat-

tern in journal articles while at the same time keep-

ing the online repository updated they were able to

present a high amount of information on their work

On Enterprise Architecture Patterns: A Systematic Literature Review

673

while avoiding the space limitations scientiﬁc pub-

lishing implies.

Based on the initial deﬁnition, patterns solve a re-

peating problem. In the case of EA patterns then, the

problem is a deﬁcit in the organization as perceived

by the stakeholders. Thus, EA practitioners would be

in the best position to detect both the problems that

repeat themselves, as well as the solutions that could

be reused to meet them. This line of thinking means

that researchers must be in contact with practitioners

far and wide in order to expand patterns, or that re-

searchers must be practitioners as well. This poses a

limitation, or it could be taken as an opportunity to

include practitioners in future works on patterns.

4.3 Fields Researching Patterns

On Figure 3 we have classiﬁed the four main types of

patterns found through the SLR in terms of the four

main layers of the Archimate Language (Lankhorst,

2017). Based on Iacob et al. (2014) and the Archimate

constructs they use to describe a Business Model (Os-

terwalder and Pigneur, 2010) it can be concluded that

Business Model Patterns are conﬁned to the Strategy

and Business layers. While the Business Process Pat-

terns was mapped to the Business Layer due to its’

scope, Business Processes, which is enclosed in this

layer.

Figure 3: Classiﬁcation of Fields.

EAM Patterns are omitted from this graph. This is due

to their focus on the practice of EA itself, the meth-

ods enterprise architects use to gather information, as

well as how they present it to stakeholders. As such

these patterns are more akin to an EA framework and

methodology. Thus, although the focus of the EAM

patterns is the EA practice itself, this is different to

the EA patterns, which is the enterprise.

4.4 Means of Representation

The overall heterogeneous way to represent patterns

is natural due to the multitude of ﬁelds and languages

comes into play. However just as Perroud and In-

versini presented in their work (P14), these patterns

may need to express concepts that any one modelling

language is unable to combine. They (P14) used mul-

tiple languages, each showing a speciﬁc point of view

to the pattern, and tied it all with natural language

description, due to the complexity of communicat-

ing these patterns. In detail, the structure proposed

by Alexander et al. (1977) should have the following

components:

• A title

• A diagram

• An Introduction describing the context and how it

builds larger patterns;

• A detailed description of the problem, its’ validity,

and ways the pattern manifests to solve it

• A detailed description of the solution, written as

instructions for people to follow;

• A diagram of the solution;

• How it links to other patterns, both smaller and

larger in scope.

Such a structure is used in a similar fashion by some

of the works in the sample, (P14, P3, P17), while all

of the works described at least some of the concepts.

It is the authors’ belief that the structure detailed by

Alexander et al. (1977), is the best basis to represent

EA patterns. Such a statement is echoed by a study

by Kotz

e et al. (2012) in the EA ﬁeld that has laid out

guidelines to the elaboration and documentation of

patterns, as well as deﬁned a pattern template, which

follows:

• Pattern Name: A unique name to identify a pat-

tern.

• Problem: The design problem which is addressed

the creation of a pattern.

• Context: In which circumstances and domain is

this pattern applicable?

• Forces: The various forces that impact the cre-

ation or existence of a pattern.

• Solution: Describe what needs to be done as

a solution that resolves forces from strongest in

this context in relation to addressing the recurring

problem.

• Related Patterns: What enterprise architecture

patterns are closely related to this one?

• Rationale: Is a description of why the solution is

an appropriate one and not another.

• Example: An artefact (e.g. a graphical model, an

algorithm, a formula, a structured rule (text), etc.),

which illustrates how the pattern operates.

Such a template comes from a study on how to write

patterns, but does not elaborate any examples. Thus

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Kotz

e et al. (2012) did not run into some of the issues

that authors in our sample did. As evidenced by the

template used by P14, shown in Figure 4, the solution

section of the template requires a longer and deeper

understanding. This is due to the multiple viewpoints

and layers a pattern may cross, like Pattern170, that

describes business, application and technology layers.

Figure 4: Table 2.10, Taken from P14.

Both P14 and Kotz

e et al. (2012) detail a representa-

tion of EA patterns that overlap on many of the con-

cepts they propose, with some exceptions. In Figure 4

there are some concepts that are missing according to

Kotz

e et al. (2012) representation but can be found in

the details: Forces and Related patterns. This means

that P14 has every concept proposed by Kotz

e et al.

(2012) except for the rationale behind the proposed

solution. Also, when one compares this way of rep-

resentation with the one proposed by Alexander et al.

(1977) it’s missing a description of the validity of the

problem. Due to this, we propose that the template

presented by P14 can be enhanced upon with a more

exhaustive structure where all the pieces can be per-

ceived at ﬁrst glance, and the rationale behind both

the problem and the solution is explicit.

4.5 Methodologies for Pattern

Extraction

A Challenge faced by all the ﬁelds in this SLR was

the gathering of the patterns. While the Business

Model Patterns can be extracted from an organiza-

tion through literature reviews and researching real

world organizations. On the other hand the patterns

presented by the EA ﬁeld are based on authors’ expe-

rience. For example P14 mentioning that the source

of these patterns is the day to day experience of the

practitioner and detecting a repeating problem. This

mention of repeating problem is also present in other

works on patterns (Alexander et al., 1977). Another

avenue seen is presenting a framework that is built

with discreet choices of concepts and then building

patterns exhausting all possible combinations. This

method is used by P2, P11, P12, and in a more lim-

ited way P24 which strives for a exhaustive work but

do not explicitly show all possible combinations. Fi-

nally, P22 took current standards and made them into

patterns.

As seen in Section 3, the 50% of studies in the

sample based the patterns from the author’s experi-

ence. When reviewing the deﬁnitions by Alexan-

der (Alexander et al., 1977) the source of patterns

is an experienced professional experiencing the same

problem again and again, so this would explain this

method’s commonality. What is missing, however, is

the argumentation on the existence of the problem,

one that fosters the need for a pattern in the ﬁrst place.

With most of the studies in the sample were missing

a framing of the problem they’re set to solve.

The second most common method of extracting

patterns is the literature review (25%), which extracts

patterns from current literature. Determining what

method is used in the sources of these literature re-

views is outside the scope of this SLR. These sources

apply their own methods.

The studies that deviate from literature review and

author’s experience are P5 and P17 which base their

patterns on standard practices. In case of P5 it’s the

ITIL library, which dictates practices on how to op-

erate the IT function of an enterprise. With P17 it’s

a framework of their own which extends upon ITIL,

Cobit, CMMI and other standards, that models the en-

tire IT function as an enterprise by its’ own worth.

This approach could be expanded upon to include

other standards that detail how organizations should

act.

In order to give the patterns validity, their def-

inition must come accompanied by some kind of

argument supporting that using the pattern indeed

solves the problem (Alexander et al., 1977). In the

sample this came from identifying organizations that

worked under patterns in question (P20, P1, P9, P11,

P14, P16, P21), from personally applying the pat-

terns (P18), from having practitioners apply the pat-

tern (P8), from building business cases (P5), or from

having other researchers validate the patterns found

(P1, P24). However, the majority of the works in the

sample describe no manner of validation (P2, P3, P4,

P6, P7, P8, P10, P12, P13, P15, P17, P19, P22, P23),

a majority of the sample.

On Enterprise Architecture Patterns: A Systematic Literature Review

675

5 CONCLUSIONS

The goal of this SLR was to investigate the different

patterns, if any, that exist in the ﬁeld of EA. Collect-

ing all the patterns found in one resource, as well as

identify other possible source of patterns. Through

this process other ﬁelds related to EA were identiﬁed.

These have also boarded the subject, producing stud-

ies that can be built upon from the EA ﬁeld, as pro-

posed in the discussion section. These ﬁelds are BMI,

Sustainable Business Development, BPM and ITSM.

It was found that among them there are 593 pat-

terns throughout the sample selected, although some

of these were written with very shallow details, others

were written as exhaustively as possible. This hetero-

geneity on scope, depth, and means of representation

means that future studies could consolidate these pat-

terns into a comparable form.

This SLR has some limitations, its’ most limiting

factor is its’ focus, the concept of pattern. Other ﬁelds

related to EA could be researching concepts similar

to patterns but with different names. For example,

the work on Human Resource Architecture might be

taken as EA patterns, speciﬁcally for the HR function

(Lepak and Snell, 2002).

Following this reasoning, the search for patterns

in other ﬁelds that could be of use to EA could be

expanded. First, by identifying what other research

ﬁelds exist that are neighboring EA that could serve

as reference disciplines and where can they be found.

Said ﬁelds could then be used to expand the pattern

repository.

A second limitation is the scope of this SLR, as

it excludes grey literature not present in the databases

queried. Through the author’s personal experience, in

the IT architecture ﬁeld there are patterns that would

be a good ﬁt in this study. Such as Patterns of En-

terprise Application Architecture (Fowler, 2012) that

details dozens of application patterns as well as de-

ployment patterns. Furthermore, subjects like cloud

architectures, of which multiple books are available,

are missing from the sample and would be valuable

to a ﬁnal repository (Wilder, 2012; Erl et al., 2013;

Kavis, 2014; Erl et al., 2015).

Lastly, future research can work towards translat-

ing the patterns found here into a complete pattern

template and written in languages useful for EA prac-

titioners, e.g. Archimate. Thus, Compiling a set of

ready-to-use solutions to repeating problems in real-

world organizations. Such a set would need to clas-

sify both problems, solutions and their consequences.

Imagine an architect looking for ways to improve sus-

tainability of an enterprise, they could peruse such a

classiﬁed set of patterns and select a solution that suits

their case.

The EA ﬁeld can beneﬁt greatly from the iden-

tiﬁcation, documentation and publication of patterns

in a way that is accessible for practitioners and re-

searchers alike. Such an effort could be accelerated

with the help of the practitioner community, who run

into the recurring problems that give birth to patterns

(Alexander et al., 1977). If built, such a repository

would serve EA efforts, which in this time of great

change will be of great value to organizations.

In order to support the looming massive changes

to organizations, the challenges they will face, al-

though big individually, will be repeatable problems.

Consequently, they could be faced using patterns.

Having a set of patterns, architects would be able to

meet these challenges with higher success.

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APPENDIX B: PATTERNS

Due to the size of the resulting patterns, they

have been published under the following address:

https://github.com/robertorgarcia/EAPatterns

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