How do skunkworks projects impact your organization?

Organizations always need to be innovating. So there's validity in recognizing that for a certain group, you do want to have them doing skunkworks or R&D projects, while also understanding how it's tied back to strategic outcomes. They still need to understand the ultimate objective of the organization, but it's important to do those projects. Otherwise we'd still be running mainframes today. It just needs to have some governance around it. 

I've come across situations in past roles where somebody's got a skunkworks application, maybe using open source, and they've been allowed to go outside of the enterprise architecture. And I've found that that person often develops this belief that the enterprise architecture doesn't apply to them, so they can do whatever they like. Then it starts to mushroom from there and it’s toxic to the architecture.