Building the Open Location Platform
HERE Technologies, formerly part of Nokia and currently owned by German automotive OEMs, is one of the leading providers of geospatial content and services. The company operates offices around the world — with key locations in Berlin, Chicago, and Seattle – and employees currently around 9.000 employees. In 2016 HERE started to consolidate its wide range of products and services gradually and to offer an enhanced suite via “The Open Location Platform” (OLP). OLP enables customers to access, store, browse, buy and sell various data sets as well as deploy and operate geospatial cloud services.
As the company moved from content into the platform business HERE found itself in a second transformation goal — to become a modern customer centric organization lead by design. HERE hired DK&A to build the design and prototyping organization required to enable both and build a best-in-breed digital product.
The Solution
DK&A has been a key partner in enabling HERE’s digital and commercial transformation. We’ve e.g. lead the design and creation of HERE’s design system, as well as the design and engineering of the HERE Open Location Platform — a key business platform that ingests, processes, and monetises HERE's most valuable asset: data.
The Result
Over the course of 25+ projects and 3 years DK&A has not only enabled HERE to build, test, and deliver the initial versions of OLP and the marketplace but also a suite of adjacent products and services. A team of up to 12 designers and engineers have supported the company in shipping the web based portal, Command Line Interface (CLI), documentation, websites as well as a number of sales and marketing demo tools targeting trade shows like CES in Las Vegas.
The broad and diverse offering of DK&A enabled HERE to maneuver and adjust as needed over the course of the 3 year partnership: “Often we don’t really quite know exactly what knowledge or experience we’ll need from the outset until we start getting underway with the work. And so DK&A helped us bridge that challenge. They have been able to respond to our needs, sometimes swapping out people as our needs change over time. Basically dialing down certain types of expertise and dialing up other forms of expertise, so that gave us flexibility.” — Kieran McMillan, Head of Product Design.