Motivated by some new examples, we shall re-visit the well known correspondence between harmonic maps/harmonic bundles and holomorphic maps/Higgs bundles.  When the domain is a compact Riemann surfaces, fundamental results were obtained by Corlette-Donaldson and Hitchin-Simpson (the Hitchin-Kobayashi correspondence).  The local version is known to differential geometers as the DPW representation, or generalized Weierstrass representation.  We shall give a review of this area and mention some new examples where the domain is "the 2-sphere minus a finite number of points".