How to Design Patterns in IS Research – A State-of-the-Art Analysis

Patterns are becoming increasingly prominent in the field of Information Systems (IS). They contain good practice solutions to recurring problems and are therefore especially valuable for systems development. Although a huge amount of patterns for nearly every problem in systems development (and even in many fields of IS such as enterprise information management or security) exist, literature still misses a systemized overview on how such patterns are developed. Approaches in practice exist but are either methodologically imprecise or lack a scientific foundation. This contribution is devoted to review the state-of-the-art on how patterns are designed. The findings of our systematic literature review reveal approaches for pattern development which we consolidate, structure and critically reflect. Since we argue that patterns can be considered design artifacts, we apply a design science research (DSR) lens to these approaches, highlight potential gaps and show needs for future development in theory and practice.