Although the CIO lunch group was formed two and a half years ago primarily as a way to share best practices in IT, a strong secondary mission soon emerged. "At pretty much every [lunch meeting] now, we do something for a not-for-profit," says John Seral, CIO at GE Energy. "We ask, 'Using technology, can we solve each others' problems as well as community problems?'"

For example, when the group decided to build a Habitat for Humanity house, "we went back and got $10,000 to $15,000 [from each member] for materials, and then we assigned project managers from each business's IT [unit]," Seral says. Several hundred IT workers from 10 companies built the house in seven working days.

Besides doing good, these philanthropic activities provide a way to get cross-company pollination of IT at a level below the CIO, Blalock says. "What was powerful about the Habitat house is that people on down the organizations got to know each other," she says. "The storage people got to know each other, for example, and they now get together to talk about what's working and not working on the storage front."

More recently, the group explored ways to assist Hurricane Katrina victims and came up with the idea of working with United Way of America to fortify its telephone system, which had been overloaded with calls after the disaster. BellSouth, for example, helped United Way set up a call center in Mississippi.

Two years ago, two senior executives from The Home Depot Inc. decided that the company would be a major sponsor of the new Georgia Aquarium, and they turned to Home Depot CIO Robert DeRodes for help with the IT aspects of the facility, such as ticketing and digital displays. "There was only so much I could do personally," DeRodes recalls. "The question was, how could I broaden my base of support?"