In the legacy, the HAD stipulated all of the uses to which full-certification-data (e.g., part-marked as if flight hardware) hardware could be applied, authoritatively originating all effectivities for a given program. It was the ultimate source for such data on the application block of the identifying drawings.
Modern practices extend this concept to software (a “Software/Hardware Authorization Document”, or “SHAD”). I haven’t investigated the SHAD concept too closely, so cannot say how the “production” issues of software (cut…paste) compares to the production issues of hardware.