Sometimes good really can be the enemy of great.
There was nothing wrong with Compuware Corp. as it stood two years ago. President and Chief Operating Officer Bob Paul was running the day-to-day operations of a billion-dollar IT solutions firm with product offerings that were selling to an array of customers. It was a stable business with established revenue channels and no outward signs of trouble.
But Paul and the leadership team at Compuware saw something different when they looked past their company’s stable surface. They saw a product-driven business that had diluted itself by covering too much ground. It wasn’t a fatal flaw, but under that set-up, Compuware could never hope to be more than what it was: a producer and seller of prefabricated products and solutions.
Paul and the other leaders of Compuware wanted more. They wanted to know what their company could really excel at and then focus on those areas.
“We were in all kinds of different business environments, selling different business solutions and products into different IT categories around the world,” Paul says. “So the new strategy we introduced was really deciding what we were going to be the best in the world at, and aligning the entire organization around the goal of being best in class.”
To make that happen, Compuware — which generated $1.1 billion in 2008 revenue — needed to more directly address the needs of its customers. The company’s leaders shifted their focus from developing and producing products and services to identifying customers’ IT pain points and constructing solutions to those problems.
“It was basically changing the conversation from ‘What does the product do?’ to ‘What customer problem are we solving, and how are we differentiating our ability to solve that problem?’” Paul says. “As a result of that, we doubled down our investment in the area of education and training, we divested ourselves of some core solutions, and through all of that, it gave us a great opportunity to reinvest and accelerate our positions in some key areas.”