 that both are concerned with developing and/or introducing new infrastructure or new prod- uct. Product lifecycle management deals with introducing new products, in the form of services delivered to customers, and assessing and taking action on product performance. 3. Infrastructure lifecycle management deals with development and deployment of new infrastructure, assessing performance of the infrastructure, and taking action to meet performance commitments. The eTOM decouples the lifecycle management processes from day-to-day oper- ations processes represented by the operations processes, operations support and readiness, FAB. The TOM integrated some of these processes in the core operations framework and this sometimes resulted in some confusion and lack of understanding. 9 Telemanagement Forum: eTOM Lifecycle management processes have different business cycle times and different types of enterprise-level objective and are closer to being business processes as against operations processes. Mixing these processes with the customer priority processes diminishes focus on the lifecycle management processes and diminishes focus on enabling and supporting customer operations processes. Processes in an e-business environment must all look to how they are enabling and supporting interaction with the customer. In addition, lifecycle management processes must be designed to meet cycle time and other performance characteris- tics that are critical to the success of the enterprise, for example, time to market of new products and infrastructure unit cost. Another key characteristic of the life- cycle management processes is that they interact with almost every other process of the enterprise. Lifecycle management processes also interact with each other. Product lifecycle management processes drives the majority of the direction for the infrastructure lifecycle management processes either directly or indirectly. These processes prepare the customer and functional operations processes to support cus- tomer interaction for pro