That seems to be the entirety of the last two jobs I've had too - go and build something in dev that's incredibly useful but not signed off/uses APIs that'd need a 6 month review process for (did something similar with LDAP access, found an endpoint and used it for something infinitely more useful to the business), once IT finds out about it, I get my wrist slapped, but have built a fairly solid business case in only a few days, and get to fasttrack through sign off to production.

Ruffle a few feathers, but organisational inertia would kill off anything particularly useful for our teams that are 24/7 fighting fires.