A few weeks ago we began collecting results for our latest survey – the subject of course (I’m sure you have been aware of this – apologies if you have received too much communication about it, but we consider it to be one of the most important subjects on the horizon at the moment) is the future of rule design. If you have not voted yet please do!

Many customers have leveraged Word and Excel as an adoption vector – after all, it is easy to “sell” Intelligent Advisor to people who use Excel every day, or who are used to working with Word. Irrespective of your opinion of Oracle Policy Modeling, and where you think the future of rule design is heading, it is hard to deny that these tools are omnipresent in every organization.

So, as we look to the future and imagine what tools might be used in the future – not basing ourselves on any concrete information, not talking about anything that might be used as a future purchasing decision criteria – just wondering about where things might go. It’s probably safe to say that a web editor is on the horizon – a fully Cloud product would need a fully Cloud editing tool.

But there are other possibilities (some which represent missed opportunities – like OpenOffice) and of course there might be no change – we could all be using Word and Excel in the Cloud. So if you are interested in the perspective of the other people who read this article / this site, here are the preferences that people have expressed so far.

The data can of course evolve as more people take the survey, but it is already fascinating reading. Of course it does not answer all of our questions, and to drill-down into the results will take further surveys and questions. But at least we can begin to see what people expect for the future of rule design.

If you are interested in learning about approaches to writing rules in Intelligent Advisor, check out our series on refactoring and object-oriented concepts in Oracle Intelligent Advisor.