Technology continually transforms our personal lives. Just think: five years ago, you could listen to music on your phone, but you had to select the song manually. Now, your voice can tell a device to complete the task with a quick demand to "play music." Artificial intelligence fosters the expectation of a more direct experience. For the businesses that create these products, innovation shows no sign of slowing down, and neither does the competition.
But while innovation may be moving at a break-neck pace, it can often have a significant opportunity cost. Today, real innovation needs to move beyond superficial advancements and deliver tangible people-centric outcomes. Technology simply for the sake of innovation no longer meets the business demand for simplified, cost-effective, and tangible solutions. The next evolution of digital transformation requires we put the human experience back into the equation.
At HARMAN Digital Transformation Solutions (DTS), we help businesses compete within the next era of digital transformation with Life-ware. More than just technology, Life-ware is an approach that brings hardware and software together to keep the human element and outcome at the core. Comprised of experts in advanced technologies, DTS teams build better products for people by looking beyond the technology to focus on how a product will make an impact in the life of the person who uses it.
We make Life-ware a reality, and not just a tagline, by building our business around that principle. Here's how the three core components --- technology, partnership, and talent --- help our teams prioritize human needs and expectations to improve everyday experiences on behalf of our clients.
Technology Led Industry Solutions: HARMAN Life-ware makes lives better.
Within the DTS group, we offer HARMAN Life-ware to address technology challenges in three verticals: telecom, healthcare, and industrial. Immersive experiences, smarter cities, better collaborations, smarter connectivity, more accessible healthcare...each vertical offers endless possibilities for innovation and countless challenges for developers.
HARMAN Life-ware makes it easier to resolve technological complexities and enrich people's lives. It focuses on what outcomes and experiences technology-led solutions deliver to transform everyday experiences for enterprises and end-users. Here are a few examples:
Bring immersive experiences to smart devices. People can feel more comfortable with and connected to digital offerings. In the medical field, a virtual reality platform app for autistic patients helps prepare them for what they'll go through in their life, so it's a smoother transition in reality.
-
Make cities smarter for the digital consumer. People can enjoy efficient and safe living and working experiences in their everyday lives. For example, some cities offer smart parking, which syncs to a phone app and shows drivers where to find open parking spots in advance.
-
Help people collaborate over vast networks. Improve communication between people while they work or reach out to family and reduce the complications and stress distance can bring to a person's daily life. There is nothing worse than poor connections during important meetings or over long distances.
-
Make virtual healthcare easy and accessible. The last thing patients need is the stress of travel when they're ill. When they can just use virtual care platforms to talk to a physician face-to-face, it can reduce risks and transportation costs for the patient. Virtual healthcare saves time.
HARMAN Life-ware provides technology and experiential foundational building blocks that any company can use to begin its digital transformation journey and support product development processes already in motion to minimize disruption even as you enhance innovation.
Partnerships: A diversity of expertise for well-rounded Life-ware solutions
As technology continues diversifying while also becoming more complex, innovation in a silo can no longer drive progress. Partnerships have become table-stakes for delivering on the promise of technological experiences - they unlock value, scale, and opportunity. From video conferencing in an office to securing agriculture intelligence from a farm, partnerships connect systems, help utilize resources more efficiently and unlock fully seamless experiences.
While having partnerships are important, what's more, important is having a significant and diverse ecosystem that supports innovation from beginning to completion. Part of our Life-ware process is infusing partner support and opportunities throughout the product lifestyle - from hardware to software and everything in-between. With this unique approach, combined with an extensive roster of partners, HARMAN DTS is able to create solutions that are more adaptable, flexible, and always human-centric.
For example, by leveraging our partners with organizations like VMware, Intel, and Samsung Artik, we can enable greater IoT experiences across a variety of verticals by simply ensuring solutions plug into existing architectures and systems. With partners like Amazon, Adobe and others we can deliver the right cloud solution for whatever needs to be built. We also maintain specialty partnerships - such as IBM's cognitive laboratories and Hortonwork's advanced analytics and prognostics solution - that round out a full ecosystem of opportunities.
Most importantly, our HARMAN DTS team understands how to make these partnerships work seamlessly together. With so much technology, and vendors, available today - becoming an expert in curating partnerships for individual client solutions is critical. Having an intimate understanding of each partner, how to infuse their services into technology while making sure the end solution is simple, effective, and human-centric is a core part of Life-ware at HARMAN.
Teams: Creating a strong foundation to be part of the Life-ware journey
Our greatest asset is our talent. From our teams of developers to the people that manage our supply chains, people are the most important link in Life-ware. Not only do they bring incredible innovation and creativity to their tasks every day, but they are on the front lines of ensuring everything we create has a human-centric outcome. We work to create a culture around the notion of Life-ware that empowers our teams to have the freedom to think outside traditional scopes, push boundaries - and push back - when they need to, and ensure they have the support to prioritize the best experiences over the fastest timelines.
At HARMAN DTS, we do that by taking an empathetic business perspective from the beginning of any project. Our approach underscores the value we see in people, including employee talent, and reiterates the meaning behind the work we all do. In line with this approach, skills are just one factor we look at when we bring on any DTS employee. At HARMAN, we challenge our teams to consistently ask two questions - what problem are we solving, and how do we ensure it works well for the end customer?
Our goal to change everyday experiences for people includes prioritizing meaningful employment for those with the skills to manage these technologies. When our employees come to work, they're not just writing code or deploying applications. They know they're making a difference.
The foundation: Creating teams to champion Life-ware
The digital transformation journey we offer stays focused on the needs of people, the problems they need to be solved, or the challenges they need to be soothed. The knowledge we share along the way eases the process internally for businesses, and the solutions propel companies into leadership positions. In a series of blogs to follow, we'll tell you in more detail how we help ensure technology does what it should do best: be there for people every day.
HARMAN DTS creates and delivers Life-ware to help you become an integral part of your end-users world. Human by design, these outcome-based solutions are crafted to blend with people's everyday lives and enrich them from within.
Case Studies
HARMAN Life-ware for Telecom: Smarter Connectivity
Challenge: Unified communications and collaboration are a constant need in the telecom industry. Silicon design and verification, improved network services, and an array of intelligent edge devices provide a solution.
Life-ware Solution: HARMAN partnered with a video conferencing software company. Using a cloud-based multi-tenant, scalable transcoding gateway, we made it easier for companies to connect their conference rooms to online video conferencing meetings using commercially available collaboration platforms.
Result: Launched the commercial product within ten months, and the customer built a healthy topline with 450+ end customers.
HARMAN Life-ware for Industrial: Smarter and Sustainable Communities
Challenge: To get smart factories, Smart building solutions, and smart transportation up and running requires a truly digital grid that makes it possible to broaden strategic initiatives at every level of planning and construction.
Life-ware Solution: HARMAN partnered with a science-based agricultural technology company. It sought to address core crop issues like low yield due to the lack of crop intelligence. The goal: improve operational efficiency, reduce downtime and enhance asset utilization in a newly developed Farm to Command Center. HARMAN helped with AWS expertise in connected machines, gateway communication, IoT security, and cloud platform development.
Result: Reduced operational cost by 15% and improved asset utilization by 25%.
HARMAN Life-ware for Living: Better Experiences
Challenge: As virtual care, health IoT, and connected fitness provide extended remote care, modernization and security of healthcare products and systems for reduced care cost and connected fitness and wellness at home is a priority.
Life-ware Solution: An innovative healthcare company wanted a partner to replace a complex blood test on babies with the world's first inobtrusive breath measurement device. HARMAN designed and developed hardware, firmware, and software, including a consumable design, simplified infant breath measuring process, and added data security features.
Result: Provisions to reduce cost by 50%, enabled a consumable driven revenue model, and significantly improved accuracy and repeatability.
