At Intranet Connections, we talk a lot about building things that last, whether that’s a platform, a customer relationship, or a team. But sometimes the harder and more honest conversation is about the moment you realize something needs to change entirely. We’re proud to share that our CEO, Rob Nikkel, was recently featured in CanadianSME Small Business Magazine with his article, “Beyond Upgrades: The Business Case for Starting Over.”
Rob’s piece traces the decision behind rebuilding IC’s platform from the ground up, and throughout it, one theme stays consistent: real progress rarely comes from simply adding more. It comes from having the discipline to ask whether the foundation underneath is still the right one.
Reflecting on more than two and a half decades building intranets for financial institutions, governments, and healthcare organizations, Rob shared that the case for change built slowly. It wasn’t one big moment, but an accumulation of small limitations; integrations that worked but never quite seamlessly, workarounds that piled up over time, until it became clear that patching the platform further wasn’t going to get the team where customers needed them to be.
The article also gets into what it actually took to commit to that decision. Bringing on new developers specifically for the rebuild. Gathering a fully remote team together in person because the moment deserved it. Choosing to build on a full Microsoft stack from day one, since that’s where most of IC’s customers already live. And involving customers throughout development, not just at the end, so the platform being built actually reflected how people work.
As organizations everywhere weigh whether to keep extending what they have or invest in something built to last, Rob’s perspective is a reminder that starting over isn’t a failure of the original vision. It can be an opportunity to rethink how to serve the community that relies on you.
We’re grateful to CanadianSME for the opportunity to share Rob’s thinking on this decision. Technology will keep evolving, and platforms will keep needing to change with it, but the reason organizations invest in tools like ours hasn’t changed at all: to stay genuinely connected, no matter how the ground underneath keeps shifting.
