USER LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT as a DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION LAYER
How consumers discover, purchase and access communications and entertainment has changed. U.S. households today have more than 425 million internet connected devices, ranging from laptops, smartphones and tablets, to video game consoles, smart TVs, blue-ray players, and streaming media devices. We’re now adding consumer wearables and connected cars to a mix that will cover our digital lifestyles both in and outside of the home. The choice of who provides us our services has changed as well. Services like live TV, video on demand, communications, messaging, fitness and smart home come from a broad range of cloud players.
Everyone is online. Everyone is digital
The connected society has had a profound effect on how users engage with their services. Cloud infrastructure eliminates geography and physical device barriers, creating boundless choice, frictionless onboarding and seamless access via the simplest digital processes.
Internet players have re-imagined the digital user relationships and are shutting operators out of the digital lifestyle. A recent O2 report shows vendors like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon accounting for up to 80% of a consumer’s digital lifecycle revenues.
Service providers and the digital user experience
Telecom and cable operators are flat footed in the race to embrace and enable new digital journeys that allow zero-manual-touch identification, onboarding and access of their core and cloud services. Constrained processes governed by underlying CRM and Billing and Identity Management systems are rooted in processes and product silos that were developed around pre-digital and pre-cloud paradigms.
In order to adapt to the new digital experience, service providers require a strategy that embodies 5 principles common among internet players:
1. Frictionless digital identification & onboarding flows
2. Seamless access to their services for every digital user
3. Rapid Integration of cloud services to the product mix
4. Understanding the user’s context across groups, devices & services
5. Data capture of every user’s interaction
These 5 principles represent specific capabilities necessary for the delivery of digital service experiences. A primary issue to consider: how does an operator’s existing back end infrastructure support these capabilities?
User lifecycle management: The digital overlay
Back end business and operational support systems will continue to persist in service provider environments, and perform important functions, 
perhaps the most important of which will be retaining the ownership of the financial and billing relationships between customers and services. As our research points out, many other next generation digital processes cannot be implemented via the inflexible and unnatural customization of these systems. BSS/OSS systems continue to maintain access relationships between financial accounts and provisioned devices like set-tops and mobile phone SIMs. But, in order to compete an overlay system is needed to de-couple a new digital user lifecycle for every user in the household, and to allow the rapid onboarding of services that can leverage a common set of frictionless onboarding, identification and access processes.
In order to enable this new digital user lifecycle, it’s clear that new processes need to be enabled outside of legacy billing and operational support systems. Without ignoring them as sources of truth altogether, a logical de-coupling (and flexible linking) of a new User Lifecycle Management capability is required to re-imagine the Digital User Relationship.
There has never been a more important time for service providers to embrace user lifecycle as they transform toward a user-centric, digital world of connectivity and connected life services. For more details on the 5 principals mentioned above – download the full whitepaper.
The author is Gemini Waghmare, CEO, UXP Systems
