InformationWeek

April 26, 1999

Salary Survey: Pay Up

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"Companies are moving beyond the functionality they've gained via ERP packages, and extending that functionality to better analyze data, adapt to changing market conditions, and to customer demand," says Marc Lewis, managing director and head of corporate IT in the New York office of executive search firm Christian & Timbers. "Y2K offered a big push for ERP," says Lewis. "With that craze slowing down, there will be fewer ERP management positions in demand in the future."

Debbie Whalen, Sensormatic Electronics Corp.'s North America project manager for ERP, agrees. "The ERP job market is redefining and refocusing itself," says Whalen, who works at the security system maker's Boca Raton, Fla., headquarters. "Companies are focusing on front-office applications, so ERP managers need to focus more on those skills to stay viable in the future." Whalen says she's been taking seminars and reading books to sharpen her Internet skills, because most of the front-office applications she deals with use the Web.

Extending ERP efforts calls for tech savvy, says Whalen, who has seen two kinds of ERP managers: those with strong IS backgrounds and some business knowledge, and those with strong business backgrounds and knowledge of a particular ERP package. "Those business-oriented ERP project managers who rushed into ERP positions without strong IS skills may have to return to business positions," says Whalen.

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Mining For Talent
Data mining skills are in high demand this year, as organizations increasingly put data repositories online. Effectively analyzing information from customers, partners, and suppliers has become important to more companies. "Many companies have implemented a data warehouse strategy and are now starting to look at what they can do with all that data," says Dudley Brown, managing partner of BridgeGate LLC, a recruiting firm in Irvine, Calif. Not surprisingly, data mining staff and managers earned the second-highest salaries --$62,000 and $80,000 respectively, according to the survey.

The hunt is on for data mining talent. Almost three-fourths of IT staff members involved in data mining said they've been contacted by headhunters in the past year; for data mining managers, it's almost nine out of ten.

"Data mining and analysis people are hard to find," confirms Sandy Sully, VP and CIO of Xilinx Inc., a semiconductor company in San Jose, Calif., with 104 IT employees. Sully hires data mining personnel on a per-diem basis through an agency, and the rates can exceed $1,000 a day per worker. She has five people implementing a data warehouse that she expects to be fully functional within the next three months. Sully expects to hire two or three more IT people to help complete the project.

Security is another burgeoning area. The Internet and E-commerce have forced businesses to pay attention to the onslaught of firewall, intrusion detection, public-key infrastructure, and encryption technologies. That's good news for vendors peddling such products, but challenging to organizations attempting to improve their security platforms with qualified help.

Like ERP managers, security managers aren't reaping the same high annual percentage base pay increases enjoyed by their staff counterparts. Security managers reported a high median base salary of $77,000, an 8.5% increase over last year. But security staff members reported the highest annual increase--13.5%--and a median salary of $59,000.

CIOs say security expertise is an increasingly valued commodity. "Security's becoming mainstream," says Tsvi Gal, CIO of ABN Amro Information Technology, a unit of ABN Amro North America Inc., with group assets of $164.4 billion. "Suddenly, people realize security can make a difference."

Gal says once businesses find enough skilled technicians, managers will be more in demand. "It's quite similar to what we saw happen with the Internet," says Gal. "First, we need the developers, then we add the managers." Gal expects demand for security managers to double over the next year.

Help Wanted
Help-desk personnel are increasingly critical to businesses, despite the fact that their base salary came in dead last in the survey, at a median of $42,000. One indication: a median annual increase of 10.5%.

And if salaries are up for help-desk staffers, they're skyrocketing for their managers. At 13.2%, their pay increase ranks first among the 12 management functions tracked in the survey.