Jason Hiner posted Seven Hot Acronyms that you need to know, to keep up with the trends in IT Management.

I decided to compare ITIL, SOA, MDM, BI, CMDB, BPM, the hot acronyms in IT management according to Jason, to see what was popular in the job market and the median salaries for these skills. (I have not used TCO - total cost of ownership in the comparison)

For those who are clueless as to what these are,

ITIL stands for IT Infrastructure library, a set of concepts and techniques to manage IT.. (wiki)

SOA - Service Oriented Architecture, a way to modularize so that components become plug and play 

MDM - Master Data Management, processes to aggregate unique information about  customers, products, vendors, employees etc.

BI - Business Intelligence, collection and analysis of business information to support better decision making

CMDB - Configuration Management Database,  a repository of information about the entire IT infrastructure

BPM - Business Process Management, manage business processes through technology to make it more efficient

Wow! Don't we love our acronyms/abbreviations.

Now continuing to find out what is in most demand and what pays the most. For the attention deficits, I will publish the result first and then the analysis.

The most popular acronym is BI - Business Intelligence which averages about 7500 jobs a month. 

The Acronym that pays the most is CMDB - Configuration Management Database with a median salary of $91.08K.

 

 

ITIL, SOA, MDM - Job Demand (July' 06 - June' 07)

 

ITIL, SOA, MDM - Median Salary Comparison

 

BPM CMDB BI - Job Demand (July'06 - June'07)

BPM, CMDB, BI - Median Salary Comparison

The Acronyms Ordered by Job Market Demand    Avg. Jobs/Month Median Salary  BI  7500  $78.59K  SOA  4000  $87.80K  BPM  3000  $84.34K  ITIL  2800  $80.98K  MDM  500  $82.34K  CMDB  200  $91.08K

 

My advice to current and future IT managers: Learn or at the very least familiarize yourself with SOA. SOA not only shows strong demand in the job market but also pays pretty well.

 

 

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We, in IT, love to mouth off acronyms, abbreviations, without any regard of whether we are understood or not. Why does IT have a high propensity to abbreviate?

Is it because

• we like to be thought of as the smartest person in the room (of course, most times, we come out as a "incomprehensible alien")
• marketing types come up with these techno mumbo-jumbo and, we drink the cool-aid and faithfully mouth it like we invented them
• its our secret handshake
• its a necessary evil that we use to get business to get excited about a mundane topic, wrap a old product/service with a catchy acronym/abbreviation and presto! sales goes through the roof.
  

 Did I leave any other reason out...

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