Chirag Mehta
Technology, Design, and Innovation strategist at the Office of the CEO, SAP, focusing on technology and architecture strategy and strategic operational, product, and management innovation. Adjunct faculty at Santa Clara University and San Jose State University with the department of computer engineering teaching graduate classes. Frequent speaker at conferences, special events, Chirag blogs at Cloud Computing.
Lead, Follow, Or Get Out Of The Way
If you have been following this blog you would know that I mainly blog about enterprise software, cloud, and big data with a few occasional posts on design and design thinking. That’s what I am most passionate about. Having spent my entire career building enterprise software I have realized that success and competitive differentiation in [...]
Justifying Big Data Investment
Traditionally companies invest into software that has been proven to meet their needs and has a clear ROI. This model falls apart when disruptive technology such as Big Data comes around. Most CIOs have started to hear about Big Data and based on their…
Thrive For Precision Not Accuracy
Jake Porway who was a data scientist at the New York Times R&D labs has a great perspective on why multi-disciplinary teams are important to avoid bias and bring in different perspective in data analysis. He discusses a story where data gathered by Über in Oakland suggested that prostitution arrests increased in Oakland on Wednesdays [...]
We Got Hacked, Now What?
Hopefully you really have a good answer for this. Getting hacked is no longer a distant probability; it’s a harsh reality. The most recent incident was Evernote losing customer information including email addresses and passwords to a hacker. I’m an Evernote customer and I watched the drama unfold from the perspective of an end user. [...]
A Data Scientist’s View On Skills, Tools, And Attitude
I recently came across this interview (thanks Dharini for the link!) with Nick Chamandy, a statistician a.k.a a data scientist at Google. I would encourage you to read it; it does have some great points. I found the following snippets interesting: Recruiting data scientists: When posting job opportunities, we are cognizant that people from different [...]
Commoditizing Data Science
My ongoing conversations with several people continue to reaffirm my belief that Data Science is still perceived to be a sacred discipline and data scientists are perceived to be highly skilled statisticians who walk around wearing white lab coats. The best data scientists are not the ones who know the most about data but they [...]
Empathize Not Sympathize
Many enterprise software vendors sympathize. “We know it’s a bad experience” or “We will fix the usability.” One of the reasons the software is not usable is because the makers never had any empathy for the end users who would use it. In many cases the makers didn’t even know who their end users were; [...]
A Journey From SQL to NoSQL to NewSQL
Two years back I wrote that the primary challenge with NoSQL is that it’s not SQL. SQL has played a huge rule in making relational databases popular for the last forty years or so. Whenever the developers wanted to design an(y) application they put an …
Minimize Regrets And Not Failures
While I ponder on 2012 and plan for 2013, I always keep the regret minimization framework (watch the short video clip above) in back of my mind. Of course luck plays a huge part in people’s success, but we owe it a lot to Jeff Bezos. We probably wouldn’t have seen Amazon.com and we most [...]
Objectively Inconsistent
During his recent visit to the office of 37 Signals, Jeff Bezos said, “to be consistently objective, one has to be objectively inconsistent.” I find this perspective very refreshing that is applicable to all things and all disciplines in life beyond just product design. As a product designer you need to have a series of [...]
Enterprise Software Needs Flow And Not Gamification
I don’t believe in gamifying enterprise applications. As I have argued before, the primary drivers behind revenue and valuation of consumer software companies are number of users, traffic (unique views), and engagement (average time spent + conversion)…
5 Tips On How To Network Effectively At Conferences
I go to a lot of conferences and quite a few people, including the ones that I mentor, have asked me how they can effectively network at a conference. Here are five simple but effective tips. Start practicing them at local meetups and refine them for large conferences. Connect before the conference: Your networking efforts [...]
Building And Expanding Enterprise Software Business In Brazil
While in Brazil, describing his country, one of my friends said, “We have all the natural resources that we need to be a self-sufficient country and we have had no natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes. The only disaster that we had: we …
Analytics-first Enterprise Applications
This is the story of Tim Zimmer who has been working as a technician for one of the large appliance store chains. His job is to attend service calls for washers and dryers. He has seen a lot in his life; a lot has changed but a few things have stayed t…
A Lean Greentech Approach
I am a greentech enthusiast and I have been closely following the greentech VC investment landscape. The VCs like Kleiner Perkins who have had a large greentech portfolio including companies such as Bloom Energy are scaling down on greentech investment…
