The Foundation tab covers the shared reference and foundational data upon which the remaining CSDM domains depend. This includes organizational and reference structures such as companies, business units, locations, users, groups, product models, and related foundational records.

Product models establish standardized product definitions. Locations provide reusable geographical and physical context for CIs and services. Business units establish organizational context and accountability. If these records are duplicated, incomplete, or modeled inconsistently, later service modeling becomes unreliable.

The guide distinguishes Foundation from Design and Planning, Build and Integration, Service Consumption, and Service Delivery. It identifies Foundation as the area containing shared reference data such as companies, locations, and users.

Crawl, Walk, Run, and Fly are progressive implementation stages. They do not replace the Foundation dashboard category that directly assesses these shared reference-data domains.

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