Skunk Works: The Sweet Smell of Success

Computerworld - If necessity is the mother of invention, then a skunk works is her creative big sister. And if you follow the logic of that family tree, necessity is also the mother of skunk works.

James Dallas, former CIO at Atlanta-based Georgia-Pacific Corp., recalls becoming a skunk works devotee after seeing too many promising projects labeled failures before the development team had a chance to get all of the kinks out. "Within a large corporation, whenever you do something, the spotlight is on it," he says. "When it's not successful, people can be too quick to cancel it. With skunk works, you can get the lessons learned in a real roll-up-your-sleeves, hands-on manner that is away from the spotlight."

Skunk works are small research and development groups formed to produce a technology or product. While the goal of a traditional skunk works is to develop a commercial product or technology, the aim of an IT skunk works is to solve an internal business problem.

The skunk works concept dates to 1943, when a group of employees at Lockheed Aircraft Corp. designed and built the first fighter jet, even though the company didn't get a formal contract from the U.S. Army Air Force until the employees were four months into the project. They took the name "Skonk Works" from the "Li'l Abner" comic strip (and changed it to Skunk Works when cartoonist Al Capp complained). Decades later, another skunk-works-bred product made headlines when Apple Computer Inc. introduced the Macintosh computer.

IT skunk works projects vary in size and scope, depending on the financial resources and manpower available. On the ambitious end of the spectrum is the Tour Optimization Planning System (TOPS) developed about three years ago by a Georgia-Pacific IT skunk works. TOPS saved the company several million dollars annually by optimizing the routing of its huge dedicated fleet of trucks, says Dallas.

"It allowed us to factor in drivers, trailers, destinations and traffic lanes," he says. "That skunk works lasted over a year. We kept going through iterations. The first couple didn't work, but we knew there was value there, so we didn't stop it."

At Bacon's Information Inc. in Chicago, Scott Thompson, senior vice president of IT, implements a more modest form of skunk works when his department needs to analyze new technologies and products. "It's difficult to take on new technology these days because there are so many options and so much complexity regarding how these things fit together," says Thompson. "Skunk works is an appropriate approach to building some expertise in order to be able to evaluate technology."