Business Patterns are a form of Design Pattern (see Concept: Pattern) and are the business-domain counterpart of Concept: Architectural Mechanism. Just as similar problems in the technical domain may be solved by using Architecture Mechanisms, similar problems in the business domain can be solved by using Business Patterns.

Business Patterns are often found in COTS products. For example, packaged applications that support Enterprise Resource Planning or Customer Relationship Management ship with functionality to support a variety of generic business processes. Similarly, it is frequently possible to identify related or similar behavior in the Use Case Scenarios and thereby derive generic designs that you can use in the design of the system. These elements of generic behavior can be expressed as Design Patterns and applied to the system design.