M.E.T.A., Inc. provides professional services and training that support a variety of strategic IT and business initiatives, including:

We have a proven track record working with large Fortune 500 companies developing business critical Enterprise Information Systems using distributed object technologies.  We also help IT organizations transform into the development organizations of the “new economy”.  Our offerings help ensure that IT solutions align with business requirements.

Consulting Services

We provide a wide range of IT consulting services.  Our service offerings are categorized as:  Enterprise Services and Application Services.  The Enterprise Services address system designs that impact the development of multiple applications.  The Application Services address the development of single applications and traditional IT staff supplementation requirements. 

Our consulting services are characterized by:

Enterprise Consulting Services

Our Enterprise Consulting Services address highly strategic system designs that impact the development of multiple applications.  These services are performed with a holistic systems perspective.  The activities include:

Systems Integration – the mechanical and repetitive coding required to tie everything together.  It includes integration with the enterprise infrastructure(s), legacy systems, and commercial products.  We use our model automation tools that automate as much of this as possible.

Enterprise Modeling – convert the corporate business model into a formal UML model.  The Enterprise Model serves as the functional requirements basis for all architecture and application designs.

Enterprise Architecture Design – identify the IT components that will automate real business processes in a reliable and scalable way.  It consists of identifying business component domains, planning the technology infrastructure that will execute the software components, and constructing a roadmap for implementing the architecture and its components.

Component Design – the precise specification of components within the Enterprise Architecture.  These components will be developed by contract, allowing them to be implemented in parallel, outsourced, or provided by third party application vendors, such as ASPs.

Architecture – determine an organization’s readiness for enterprise architecture.  We can adapt this assessment to evaluate existing projects to determine the quality of a proposed architecture.

Application Consulting Services

Our Application Consulting Services address single system designs and traditional IT staff supplementation requirements.  In our services model, the Application Services usually supplement the strategic Enterprise Services.  The activities include:

We can provide skilled IT professionals with a variety of application and software integration/development expertise, such as:

Methodology

We are familiar with several object-oriented software development methodologies using the industry standard Unified Modeling Language (UML).  We don’t impose a particular vendor’s methodology, as we strive to remain flexible to meet the needs of our clients.  All worthy methodologies follow the same high-level approach, though each proprietor of the methodology may use different terminology to describe it. 

Rational has published a high-level framework for object oriented software integration and development called the Rational Unified Process, or RUP.  It presents the development life cycle as a sequence of phases called Inception, Elaboration, Construction, Transition, and Production.  Each of these phases is characterized by its focus on the process activities of business modeling, requirements gathering, analysis & design, implementation, test, deployment, and support.  These activities are performed incrementally and iteratively such that the system is evolved over time.  The actual development artifacts produced will depend on the client’s needs, but the general evolutionary nature of a good methodology is the same.  Each iteration should focus on risk mitigation and provide tangible value to the business users.  We adhere to this methodology framework and the evolutionary execution of it.

In addition to an evolutionary methodology, we focus on the modeling aspects of the software development process with an emphasis on architecture and enterprise modeling.  We also use model automation tools to automate implementation and reduce the degree of testing.

Training & Mentoring

We provide mentoring, as part of our onsite Consulting Services, in the object-oriented subjects below.  These subjects can also be taught as a formal curriculum in a training seminar.

Distributed Computing

UML

Patterns

When Should You Call Us?

Our services can be inserted at various points in the project life cycle, depending on the scale of the project.  For enterprise projects, we can begin architecture and modeling as part of a formal business process engineering effort, or come in to quickly assess an existing development effort.  We can begin at the architecture definition phase of a project to work on prototypes and produce the deliverables to be used by the application development teams.  We can begin at the implementation phases to supplement your development staff with the required skills.