For the mature people analytics team
You have the researchers and the talent. What your function cannot produce from inside its own instruments is the evidence — an upstream assessment of governance, infrastructure, methods, and products, in a form the executive audience you need to convince will actually fund. The Ikona Systems Diagnostic is that instrument.
Here is how the instrument works.
Built by practitioners from the people analytics and HR technology functions at Amazon, Meta, Nike, and Expedia.
The situation
The dashboards that do not get used. The models that do not get trusted. The budget cycle that never ends in your favor. The executive conversation that keeps landing half a step off. These are the symptoms mature PA functions spend their days managing. They are almost never the problem itself.
The problem sits upstream in four places: governance, infrastructure, methods, and products. Decisions, data flow, analytical approach, and what the team ships. Your dashboards measure the workforce. Nothing in your stack measures the function that produces the dashboards — and no one inside the function is positioned to run that assessment without a conflict of interest.
The Ikona Systems Diagnostic was built to assess all four, with the rigor of a technical audit and the depth of a practitioner-led engagement, and to produce evidence the executive audience will actually act on.
What the ISD assesses
Not a cultural assessment. A rigorous upstream assessment that runs four diagnostic threads in parallel and returns initial findings in under 30 days, with the full current-state benchmark delivered in under 90 days. Each thread combines technical review with practitioner-led interview evidence, and lands as a structured, queryable knowledge asset your function can keep querying.
<30 days
To initial findings
First evidence across all four verticals inside the first month.
<90 days
To the full benchmark
What internal teams take 1–2 years to surface, delivered in a quarter.
1,700+
Pages of structured intelligence
The queryable evidence base produced per engagement — yours to keep querying.
Fortune 100
Proven methodology
Built and run by practitioners from Amazon, Meta, Nike, and Expedia.
Who owns the function, who owns the data, and where the authority actually sits when it matters. Most of the conversations a PA leader cannot win are governance conversations misdiagnosed as technical ones. We assess the difference before it costs you the budget cycle.
The flow of data through your stack, the handoffs between systems, and the gap between what the infrastructure supports today and what the next two years of use cases will require. Rigorous enough for your engineering counterpart to respect.
Whether the analytical approaches your function uses match the questions your organization is asking. We benchmark current-state methods against the maturity of the function and what leading practice looks like at your stage. Where the next investment belongs.
The dashboards, models, reports, and research your team ships, and whether they are landing with the audiences they are built for. Most mature PA functions have a product portfolio they have never audited at the level the next investment cycle will demand. The audit is usually where the defensible wins live.
Delivered as an intelligence module your function can keep querying, built to survive the next budget cycle and the next leadership change.
“We had the dashboards and the headcount. What we could not produce from inside the function was the evidence to defend the next investment cycle. The ISD gave our CHRO a current-state benchmark in under 90 days — the conversation we had been losing for two budget cycles, we won in one.”
Why this is possible
Designed by people who built, scaled, and defended these functions at Amazon, Google, and Facebook. We know what the evidence gap looks like from the inside — because we lived it.
Mature function
You have built the stack, run the roadmap, and staffed the team. Something upstream is off and you know it. The evidence you need to name it, defend the next investment cycle, or reshape the operating model does not sit inside your function’s own instruments. The ISD produces that evidence, in a form built for the executive audience you need to convince.
What you get
Governance — where the authority actually sits when it matters. Infrastructure — the two-year gap between what your stack supports and what the roadmap demands. Methods — whether your approaches match the questions the business is asking. Products — which parts of the portfolio are landing and which are not. Delivered as an intelligence module your function can keep querying and that survives the next leadership change.
Practitioners, not generalists
Co-founder and CEO
Former head of people analytics at Amazon (1M+ employees), JPMorgan Chase, and Google. 20+ years building enterprise analytics functions at scale.
Co-founder and CTO
Former machine learning product leader at Amazon and Expedia. Leads Ikona’s platform and the knowledge store infrastructure that makes the methodology run at scale.
Co-founder and CPO
Built people analytics at Meta, Uber, Nike, and Argo AI, then served as VP of People Analytics Strategy at One Model. HR Tech 100 honoree.
Beyond the three founders
Three founders run every engagement. Behind them is a marketplace of senior people analytics practitioners we pull in when the question demands specific expertise. Compensation benchmarking. Workforce planning at scale. DEI measurement. Specific HCM platforms. Anyone we add has held the role. No analysts billing at partner rates.
We do not pretend to be experts in everything. We know the people who are: compensation, talent mobility, HR tech selection, org design. Every specialist we bring in has done the job at enterprise scale.
Scope expands mid-engagement and the bench expands with it. Scope tightens and we stop billing for bodies you do not need. No new SOW, no renegotiation, no second firm.
Whoever we pull in works from the same structured knowledge store your engagement is building. Nobody starts from scratch. Nobody duplicates questions.
Before you book the call
Those instruments score you against a generic industry framework and hand you a scorecard or a percentile ranking. The ISD is an upstream assessment of your specific function, stakeholders, and organizational context. The governance thread diagnoses how decisions actually get made here, not in an ideal model. The infrastructure thread assesses your actual data flow, not a reference architecture. Scorecards do not survive contact with an executive audience. Evidence does.
No. The ISD assesses the function and the structures around it, not the people inside it. Your team continues to own the analytics, reporting, ML, and ongoing delivery. We run the diagnostic your function is not structured to run on itself, and we give you ongoing access to a knowledge store afterward. Most leaders walk into the next executive review with evidence they could not have produced from inside the function.
Yes. The ISD can be run against a single vertical or against a specific strategic question when a full four-vertical engagement is not the right fit yet. A single-thread governance or products run is a common starting point for mature functions that already know where the evidence gap sits. Ask us about it on the call.
We are the bench your analytics team cannot hire.
Thirty minutes with a founder. No deck. No pitch. A conversation about where the evidence gap actually sits in your function — and what the ISD would produce for the executive audience you need to convince.
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