Today we are interviewing Akira Iwata from Japan who contributed for the japan support of BOS.
Please tell us a bit about yourself.
I currently work as a BPM practitioner in Tokyo, Japan, and also as a key member of BPM Japan Association (www.bpm-j.org) Since 2006, we are making efforts to give everyone a clear understanding of BPM, and developing a methodology of BPM approach.
I specialize in business process modeling with BPMN for analysis, design and implementation. I had participated in BPM Think Tank (the first event on BPMN) in USA in 2005, and from that time, I have been watching BPM software trends and a good solutions with BPMN standard.
What have you done with Bonita Open Solution, or what kind of projects have you used BOS with?
I studied for potential to apply BOS to Japanese users and identified the bottleneck to use it.
Then, I translated the user interface and the tutorial documents into Japanese, and also reported some problems for Japanese use through community. I am now waiting for the release of Japanese enabled version. If I get it, I will introduce BOS to Japanese.
Which version of BOS did you start with (or when did you start using BOS) and what are you using now?
I found out that BOS supports BPMN 2.0 and BPMN XML-DI in Bruce Silver’s new letter in Nov, 2011, and tried BOS 5.6.1. I am now using BOS 5.7.1.
Name 3 features of BOS that you really like. Why did you choose BOS?
- Enterprise BPM Suite supporting BPMN 2.0 standard
- A professional Java developer is not needed
- Democratizing BPM
I named BOS as Casual BPM like a UNIQLO - easiness, low-cost, great style and superior functionality
What do you find useful or helpful about the Bonita community?
I have translated BOS into Japanese with the community translation application. The translation lasted for over 5000 lines and was hard but Babili Bulk reduced my work very much. This open facility is excellent! At the same, I investigated the problems on process modeling and design application for Japanese use; sometimes I looked at source code in order to seek a solution to the issue, and then reported the several issues through community tracker and forum. Those issues are being resolved steadily. This open facility is excellent too! According to tracker, I can forecast that Japanese enabled version will be BOS 5.7.2.
Through this experience for the recent three months, I actually feel the benefit of the Bonita community.
Do you have a blog?
I have a private blog, www.biz-tech-services.com, and have been introducing a new wave of BPM technologies in Japanese since 2005. Of course, I introduced BOS in my blog. I am now preparing another special web site for BOS community in Japanese.