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)
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ITIL, SOA, MDM - Median Salary Comparison
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BPM CMDB BI - Job Demand (July'06 - June'07)
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BPM, CMDB, BI - Median Salary Comparison
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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 |
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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.
Salaries Offered for Perl, Php, Python and Ruby Positions
Future salary is a significant motivator for somebody to learn a new language (use it for a living). We used the OdinJobs Market Statistics tool to help us analyze which skill pays more. The market statistics tool helps analyze salaries offered in jobs targeting junior-mid level programmers and senior/Lead/Architect developers.
First we compared how salaries varied between a jr-mid level position and a senior level position within a language. The results are below.
 | Perl Median Salary Comparison Senior level architects and lead programmers using perl earn 10% more than the developers. This is a median salary, which means a lot of variation in salaries is squished into a single number. In all jobs that required perl, the median salary was $80,560. The variations in median salary also varies according to locations but this chart has been generated for the entire United States.
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PHP Median Salary Comparison Median Salary for All Php jobs: $66,200 Median Salary for Php Architects: $71,000 Median Salary for Php Developers: $64,540
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 | Python Median Salary Comparison
Median Salary for all Python Jobs: $75,720 Median Salary for Python Architects: $80,310 Median Salary for Python Developers: $74,790
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Ruby Median Salary ComparisonMedian Salary for all Ruby Jobs: $74,150 Median Salary for Ruby Architects: $82,890 Median Salary for Ruby Developers: $ 73,880
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This is part of the "What Makes a Programming Language Popular" series where we compare Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. See