T-Mobile Business Unconventional Awards

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Unconventional INNOVATION

Innovation in Customer Experience

New technologies can lift the performance of any organization. What happens when they’re deployed in combination with fresh, innovative mindsets and positive collaboration? That’s when true transformation is unleashed. That spirit of creative problem-solving, fueled by talented people doing remarkable things through connectivity, is celebrated by T-Mobile for Business through its 2023 Unconventional Awards. “These customers are leveraging the potential of 5G connectivity to do amazing things,” says Callie Field, president, T-Mobile Business Group. “Our winners illustrate the ways in which unconventional thinking can reshape a business and enable the talents of people to shine through. We see The Unconventional Awards as a guidepost for companies with similar ambition to transform and grow.” Read on to learn more about this year’s first-place winners.

About the Awards

The Award Winners

Innovation in Customer Experience: Infosys

Innovation in Employee Enablement: The Walt Disney Studios

Innovation in Industry: Boston Children’s Hospital

Innovation in Community: City of Bellevue

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What if you could take a sport loved by millions across the globe and completely change the way fans—and even the professionals—experience it? Through its Infosys Tennis Platform, the “digital brain” of the ATP Tour, that vision is now a reality. With T-Mobile 5G, fans can access various aspects and data points of the Infosys Tennis Platform seamlessly and enjoy a more immersive experience, bringing them deeper into the game. “You have the ability to go back and review points—or even freeze a moment inside a point. We have created a tool where if a fan wants to see only the aces in the match, they can get that in a matter of minutes,” says Navin Rammohan, vice president, segment head marketing at Infosys. “These features are not just being used by fans, but also by players and coaches to look at how they can improve their performance.”

The impact network improvements have on the creative process is profound. Every aspect of production can be supported through the 5G network, fueling the innovation and creative that generations of families have come to expect from Disney. “We manufacture time. We can’t make the clock go any slower, but we can use advancements in network capabilities to improve decision-making and collaboration,” Haynie says. “There are so many of these little opportunities, and we find them through the whole lifecycle of a title. Directors, creative executives and post-production teams can collaborate as if they were all together—and focus solely on their craft.” When people no longer have to worry about communication glitches or delays, the talent shines through. “To me,” he says, “the magic is when we can deliver a solution and the teams say, ‘I never thought that was possible.’”

Boston Children’s Hospital: A Network Built for Collaborative Care

Innovation in Industry

The Walt DISNEY Studios: Powering Boundless Creativity

Creativity has no boundaries, but sometimes it comes with challenges. StudioLAB, within The Walt Disney Studios organization, needs to enable innovative, high-end production in any environment, from isolated villages to the busiest city streets. “Productions are in constant ‘hot’ communication with teams on set and at the studios as material is developed and footage is captured, transferred, reviewed—often live,” says Alice Taylor, director, technology innovation. “Without reliable remote communication connectivity, productions can suffer costly delays or out-of-sync feedback.” With T-Mobile for Business, the Disney Studio Technology Production team developed a platform based on T-Mobile 5G networks, enabling teams to maximize available connectivity in any environment. That, notes Josh Haynie, vice president, production technology at Disney Studios, includes places where connectivity hadn’t previously existed. In one particularly isolated location, “We were able to move forward on a very, very important part of the process, allowing remote viewing to our creative teams in Burbank,” he says. “That’s pretty impressive.”

The City of Bellevue: A Vision of Safer Communities

Innovation in Community

Infosys is impacting the broadcast booth as well, leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to create the “AI Shot of the Day,” which can isolate the best point out of the thousands played in a single day based on criteria like stroke difficulty, point cruciality and crowd engagement. “And with 5G technology, that’s where T-Mobile is connecting the fans more seamlessly to access these rich insights as the match plays on,” Rammohan says. “Your network has to be seamless to provide that kind of data within a matter of seconds. With a strong network and strong connectivity, combined with stronger computing power and serverless cloud operations, you can connect data points in ways that had been completely unimaginable.”

Meanwhile, the strength of Bellevue’s network helps optimize data gathering, revealing insights from multiple connected devices including vehicles, video cameras, lidar sensors and other intelligent transportation systems so stakeholders can proactively make improvements to the city’s transportation infrastructure. Bellevue’s commitment to safety is rooted in a “people-centered” approach shared by T-Mobile for Business, says Sabra Schnieder, chief information officer, City of Bellevue. “We found them to be a welcome partner in user-centered design—and in deeply thinking about how Bellevue can leverage technology and connectivity in support of public service and public good. C-V2X is a great example.”

According to data from the Washington State Department of Transportation, in the City of Bellevue, Washington, nearly half of all traffic deaths and serious injury crashes between 2013 and 2022 involved a person walking or bicycling. But what if vehicles could seamlessly communicate with each other and the city’s traffic infrastructure, delivering safety information to drivers and heading off potentially dangerous confrontations between cars and people before they happen? That’s the goal behind Bellevue’s cellular-vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) application—a safe driving solution that can be integrated into a car’s connectivity software as part of Vision Zero, an international program dedicated to eliminating traffic injuries and fatalities. The project will leverage T-Mobile’s award-winning 5G network to establish reliable and low-latency connections, enabling vehicles and traffic infrastructure to exchange information and notifications about pedestrians and cyclists in near real time. “Connectivity is critical for this system to work, and latency—the delay between one device transmitting information and being received by another device—is mission critical when milliseconds are what can avoid a tragic outcome,” says Franz Loewenherz, mobility and solutions manager, City of Bellevue. “You might say T-Mobile is the glue bringing together these disparate technology components.”

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Learn more about the winners of The 2023 Unconventional Awards.

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Innovation in Employee Enablement

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Innovation in Employee Enablement

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Innovation in Employee Enablement

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Infosys Tennis Platform is helping connect tennis fans to the game in exciting and deeply engaging new ways.

Boston Children’s Hospital developed innovative connectivity solutions that benefit clinicians and patients, enabling better care.

The City of Bellevue is building a network to limit—and even eliminate—pedestrian and cyclist injuries on its roadways.

Infosys: Elevating the Fan Experience

T-Mobile for Business is helping connect tennis fans to the game in exciting and deeply engaging new ways.

T-Mobile for Business gives Disney StudioLAB the ability to bring its creators together—any time, any place.

Boston Children’s Hospital developed innovative connectivity solutions that benefit clinicians and enable better care.

Collaborating with T-Mobile for Business, these four winners of The Unconventional Awards are innovating on their own terms.

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We always have to be finding a new way to connect our teams, because our creatives are always finding new opportunities and they want to come to us and say, “Hey, by the way, how does this work? Do you think you can make this work?” And to me, that's the magic, man, when we can deliver a solution and they go, “I never thought that was possible.” And it's just like, “Yeah, it's all good.”

People can sit at their homes and get this kind of an experience, which earlier they would have to go to the stadium and get. And we did this using a private 5G network. I could watch each of the matches and the points from different angles. I could watch it like I am the chair umpire, so I could get a top angle of the thing. I could be a ball boy and watch the game. All of this was not possible through a TV angle or even by being in the stadium, but it was possible through the virtual channels.

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I'm relying on T-Mobile and their expertise when it comes to cellular connectivity and networks and architecture to partner with me and my teams. And I feel very confident and I feel really good about that, that this is not just a client-vendor relationship, that it's a true partnership.

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If we can make this solution operational in Bellevue, it will be transplanted in other communities, small and large, elsewhere in the nation. That's especially exciting for Bellevue because we aspire to inspire and be inspired by other communities who are similarly working to address this public health crisis.

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Innovation in Employee Enablement

T-Mobile for Business gives The Walt Disney Studios’ Technology teams—StudioLAB and Production Technology—the ability to bring creatives together … any time, any place.

Innovation in Employee Enablement

Boston Children’s Hospital is dedicated to improving and advancing the health and well-being of children around the world through its life-changing work in clinical care. It is also home to the world’s largest pediatric research enterprise. “What we do in clinical innovation is astounding,” says Heather Nelson, senior vice president and chief information officer at Boston Children’s Hospital. “The supporting IT infrastructure needs to match that excellence.” Boston Children’s was developing a strategy to enhance both clinician and patient experiences while also preparing for future technologies, like leveraging generative AI to improve clinician workflow. It began with an assessment of the hospital’s IT infrastructure to upgrade its electronic medical record (EMR) system. The assessment revealed the hospital’s Wi-Fi system posed challenges for advancing and optimizing clinical mobility. The hospital collaborated with T-Mobile to develop a truly holistic solution with T-Mobile for Business. “We created a 5G cellular network that healthcare practitioners can use to access patient information at any time, with any device, anywhere—securely,” Nelson says.

Not only will the 5G Hybrid Network from T-Mobile’s Advanced Network Solutions (5G ANS) improve capacity and connectivity for tens of thousands of patients and visitors on campus, it will also enable a highly secure connection for Boston Children’s employees. This will allow them to access Boston Children’s internal systems and applications from virtually anywhere. Nelson sees the architecture—and the partnership with T-Mobile for Business—as a model for other hospital systems and healthcare organizations. “A cellular infrastructure is not the first place people think can be innovative, but that’s what CIOs and CTOs need to be thinking about, now more than ever,” Nelson says. “We’ve designed a scalable solution able to meet the expectations of our providers, clinicians, researchers and, most importantly, our patients and their families.”