Knowing how to sell Oracle Intelligent Advisor (to your boss, to your company, to your colleagues or even to yourself) is key to a successful implementation – if nobody knows why they need Oracle Intelligent Advisor, nor what it can do for them, how can you expect to succeed? Of course, let’s be clear – the answer to the question in the title could also be “Don’t, because it is not right for you – for whatever practical, political, technical or economic reason(s) are relevant”.

So we have to consider that the answer is not always what we might hope for or expect. And before we get started in this series, one more thing – all the content here is just opinion, or educated opinion. You can ignore it all and go with your hunch or your methodology.

Let’s begin with the end in mind – even if it might not be possible to think of it this way. There are three possible answers that come to mind, before we think about “How”, should we even be thinking about “selling it”?

• Yes, the situation is a good one for Oracle Intelligent Advisor. It is the correct choice for the company
• No, the situation is not a good one. Oracle Intelligent Advisor is not the correct or best choice for the company or situation
• Maybe. The situation has both good and bad to it – the response is not clear-cut but there are elements in favour and against.

Sounds like every non-required radio button you have ever seen in Oracle Intelligent Advisor, right?

Forgive the “private joke” OIA humour. But the reality is that often, the answer is “somewhere in the middle”. Let’s put that to one side and consider the basic questions that we would likely ask ourselves, and that we should ask others, to better understand the business and the business problem that is trying to be solved (otherwise, why are we having this conversation?).

This is clearly going to be a series of articles – so we need to start somewhere. When we have gone through several different parts of the question, we can come back and try and bring it all together. We’ll start with the key product points. In the later articles we will focus on the business reasons and scenarios that correspond to the strong points of Oracle Intelligent Advisor. But first let’s set the scene.

Really, if you have come to this from the point of view of not knowing at all what Oracle Intelligent Advisor actually is, you should start at the beginning, something like this presentation:

So how shall we answer the question “how to sell Oracle Intelligent Advisor”? The easiest way is to look at the areas where Oracle Intelligent Advisor is particularly strong, and work backwards from there.

It’s all about Decision Automation!

Businesses that have quality of service issues, businesses that need to make the right decisions in the right timeframe and that need to take those decisions on every channel, in front of the customer or in the back office with the same efficiency. Organizations that need the confidence to be able to provide services and assistance to their citizens with the full confidence of the law.

Explain the Decisions

If the need to automate decisions is often the most important driver, then it is often accompanied with the need to justify, explain, demonstrate and clarify the reasons behind a decision. Whether it be for an agent to explain why a benefit has been paid, or a customer service agent explaining when a refund will be paid, businesses and organizations need to be able to explain the decisions and archive them for reference or for legal reasons. Again, whether they are needed in HTML, PDF, XML or JSON (or indeed any other format), we’ve got you covered.

Easily Integrate and re-use data from other systems

A great decision automation engine will fail if the source data is hard to reach or the decision automation engine makes it hard to access the valuable information it provided, then there is little reason to get excited. Oracle Intelligent Advisor covers all the bases:

• Integration Servers : Any XML or REST based
• Applications : Any XML or REST based
• Batch Calculations and Single Shot (Massive scalability down to single-shot calls)
• Mobile Devices including Disconnected Mode
• Chat Clients (Oracle, Facebook, Amazon, etc..)

Easily load information from your CRM / CX platform to “pre-seed” information and then let the agent complete the rest. Send the results back to your integration service or application. Use the same rules and logic (build once, deploy anywhere) in a Chat with the customer, with an agent in the CX platform, with an inspector on the ground using a Tablet, with a back-office engine that calls a nightly batch to recalculate the results.

Tailor the Experience

If we spent the first part of this article talking about continuity of logic and build once deploy anywhere, it is also true that the need to customize the experience is a key driver and key strength of Oracle Intelligent Advisor. For example:

• Remove irrelevant questions from a decision
• Handle rules changing over time
• Manage customized experiences for different populations
• Tailor advice given or calculated : visually, numerically and logically

Oracle Intelligent Advisor makes it easier to create a single platform that covers multiple situations, that provides the right, personalised experience. Whether it be defining the next steps, the correct procedure to follow, or the correct conditions of sale or return, the designer can ensure that the time spent getting an answer is fast and reliable. And in a world where organizations have to do more with less time, this counts.

Accelerate Delivery and Modification, Improve Adherence

Oracle Intelligent Advisor projects are truly mixed-team. The nature of the way the rules are written : in natural language, with obvious formatting, familiar document structure (table of contents, paragraphs, Excel tables, references) increases the ability to map to source materials and thus improve isomorphism, buy-in from the business or the legal team and quality of reviews. Couple this with a complete testing engine based on Excel and Oracle Intelligent Advisor projects drive value by ensuring modifications are quickly implemented and reliably tested.

• Works well in agile environments with easy controlled modification
• Great automated and manual testing engines
• Excellent what-if and analysis of results
• Easily reference source materials and create easy-to-read content

So now we’ve come to the end of this first post – taking about big-picture stuff. In the next post, we will dig a little deeper into typical scenarios for different industries as we discuss how to sell Oracle Intelligent Advisor. We’ll even try and make Oracle Intelligent Advisor do the work for us!