SABSA Attributes

A further refinement is the use of SABSA Business Attributes.  These attributes are compiled from extensive experience with numerous clients in many countries and industry sectors.  Over the course of that work it became apparent that although every business is unique, there are commonly recurring themes.  This experience has been used to create a taxonomy of SABSA Business Attributes, shown in the next figure.  These are organised under seven group headings.

The SABSA Taxonomy of Business Attributes - click on image for larger view

Each SABSA Business Attribute is an abstraction of a real business requirement previously encountered in client work, most of them encountered many times over.  Each SABSA Business Attribute has a detailed definition and some suggested guidelines for applying metrics to that attribute, not included in this overview. 

This is a very powerful tool that allows any unique business to be translated and ‘normalised’ into a SABSA Business Attributes Profile.  This profile selects only those SABSA Business Attributes that apply to this specific business (creating new attributes if there are found to be gaps).  The taxonomy provides a check-list of possible attributes and the business analysts can decide whether or not a given attribute should be included in this specific profile. The SABSA Business Attributes Profile is an important conceptualisation of the real business and has many additional powerful applications in areas such as Risk Management, Assurance, Governance, Continuity and Service Management. It forms a core part of the ‘Conceptual Architecture’.  It can be seen on row 2, column 1 of the SABSA Matrix