For the new people analytics leader
You have the researchers and the talent. What you do not yet have in year one is the evidence — a structured map of governance, infrastructure, methods, and products before you spend twelve months drawing it yourself. The Ikona Systems Diagnostic is the discovery capacity your function is not resourced to run on itself.
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. You inherited these the day you signed the offer. Managing them will eat your first year.
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 nothing in your first-year workload gives you time to measure it yourself.
The Ikona Systems Diagnostic was built to assess all four on your behalf, with the rigor of a technical audit and the depth of a practitioner-led engagement, and to hand you the map before you spend a year drawing it yourself.
What the ISD assesses
Not a cultural assessment. A rigorous upstream assessment that runs four diagnostic threads in parallel and produces a current-state benchmark. Each thread combines technical review with practitioner-led interview evidence.
Who owns the function, who owns the data, and where the authority actually sits when it matters. Most of the conversations a new PA leader cannot win are governance conversations misdiagnosed as technical ones. We assess the difference before you walk into the first one blind.
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 the engineering counterpart you have not yet met.
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 first investment should go.
The dashboards, models, reports, and research your team ships, and whether they are landing with the audiences they are built for. Most PA functions have a product portfolio that has never been audited. For a new leader, the audit is usually where the fastest wins hide.
Delivered as an intelligence module you can query from day 91, built to survive every budget cycle that follows.
Why this is possible
Designed by people who spent their own first year learning the same way — by running into walls. The ISD is the instrument we wish had existed on day one.
First 12 months
Who holds budget. Who trusts the function. What the organization actually expects. Where the tacit landmines are buried. Most leaders spend a year learning this by running into walls. We compress it to 90 days by running the ISD across all four verticals on your behalf. You land on day 91 with a structured map your peers at year two still do not have.
What you get
Governance — who decides, who approves, who can be overruled. Infrastructure — the data flow, the handoffs, the two-year gap. Methods — what the questions you are being asked actually require. Products — the portfolio audit your team has never run. Delivered as an intelligence module that survives the next budget cycle and 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
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. For a new leader with a narrow first-100-days mandate, a single-vertical run is often the right starting point. Ask us about it on 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.
We are the bench your analytics team cannot hire.
Thirty minutes with a founder. No deck. No pitch. A conversation about where your function actually stands on day one — and what the ISD would map in the 90 days that follow.
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