Everyone knows the legend of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, immortalized and fictionalized in the film The Social Network.He went from college dropout to multimillionaire in just a few short years.

Jan Koum, CEO of WhatsApp was raised in the Ukraine in a home with no electricity and attended a school that did not have bathrooms.  He signed his recent billion-dollar deal with Facebook at his former welfare office, giving the world a literal picture of where he came from and where he’s going.

And then there’s Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s founding members and a backer of Square, Nest Labs, Good Fit and other tech companies. In addition to being a top Silicon Valley tech exec, he went on to become a pitchman for Stolichnaya Vodka and directed a short film alongside Ron Howard.

The big players in Silicon Valley have become the new American hero (or villain, depending upon who you talk to). Many came from nothing, or from very little. They are young. They are rich. People make movies about them and they make vodka commercials and short films with Ron Howard. Tech executives are the new American rock star.

CIOs: Rock Stars of the Board Room

But it’s not just tech-based companies that are part of this elevation of the tech pro to rock star status. Across all industries, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has quickly become one of the most important and influential members of the C-Suite. 

CIOs used to be tasked with managing a company’s IT systems. Now, organizations from every industry employ CIOs to help them drive their corporate vision. They have moved away from CIO-as-head-service-provider to facilitators of efficiency and innovation. Customer experience is critical to corporate survival. Thanks to companies like Amazon and Zappos, consumers have come to expect the same efficiency and service levels from every company they do business with.  And so, CIOs and their reports are tasked with improving customer experience by developing new ways to connect with them and in the process, have become critical to corporate growth.

And as people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jan Koum, and Biz Stone take up space on the cover of magazines and in the pages of Inc., Forbes, AdAge, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, non-tech companies are taking notice. They want to emulate the success of these Silicon Valley rock stars, and they are doing that through their CIOs.

What Does This Mean for Non-Tech Companies?

Whether an organization is considered a “tech company” or not, information technology is critical to business operations. Data collection and customer intelligence is driving decision making, and departments that previously had no desire or need for “Big Data” suddenly crave it.  And the success of tech startups has driven non-tech companies to study their business practices, emulate their philosophies, and hire young tech talent to drive innovation.

CIOs and IT departments are moving out of the shadows and into the sunlight, driving business success across all industries.