Business and IT organizations often use different worldviews expressed in different languages In order to create information management systems that serve the needs of complex, non-trivial and rapidly changing businesses, effective communication is a must. In order to communicate effectively, a small set of common clearly defined concepts and constructs is essential. These effective patterns of reasoning help our thinking at all stages of information management lifecycle and provide greater and explicit synergy of business and IT.This paper shows how the international standard Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing defines the fundamental patterns of reasoning and how such patterns have been successfully used to formulate and represent business specifications.