Ah I see what you are asking. The company I work for designs, builds and sells medical devices. The software team's role is more focused on improving the workflow of other departments or building tools that help with more general company wide needs (interactive campus maps, kiosks, corporate directory applications).

Example would be a tool I built for a team member that works with flex licenses (Autodesk, etc). He has a command line tool that lists how our licenses are used but it's a pretty verbose dump which isn't fun to read manually. I wrote a parser for this command and wrapped it up in a web app which provides a table of all users, charts on usage, data storing for historical metrics and so on. He is now able to better understand our usage and can more accurately guess as to when we need to purchase more licenses. He can also see what we are not using to reduce our company costs.

The things we've built don't go through any "system" and are developed simply between the requester and the software team (nothing really public so far, all internal tools). As a result, our increased speed is only a positive. However, I can understand in other companies when increased code/updates would cause tons of stress on the teams so your point is valid.