For the HR shared services and operations leader
The tacit knowledge in your service center is an asset you cannot quantify and cannot replace. When tenured agents leave, the knowledge leaves with them, and your platforms never captured it. We turn that tacit knowledge into a structured, queryable store that your agents, your knowledge base, and your AI agents can all pull from. In 90 days. Built specifically for functions scaling ServiceNow, Leena AI, or equivalent.
Here is how the diagnostic works.
Built by practitioners from the people analytics and HR technology functions at Amazon, Meta, Nike, and Expedia.
The situation
For the last decade, HR shared services was measured on cost per ticket, deflection, SLA, and CSAT. Your function got good at all of them. The stack was built for them. The executive conversation was grounded in them.
It is no longer grounded in them. Your CHRO, COO, and board ask different questions. Where is the function creating value, not just absorbing volume. How is employee experience improving, not just being measured. How do you scale ServiceNow or Leena AI past the plateau every implementation hits, which is the point the tacit knowledge your agents need was never written down.
That plateau is the most common moment shared services leaders book a call with us. The platform is installed. The pilot performed. Production runs into walls the playbooks do not cover. The Ikona Operations Diagnostic was built for this inflection.
What the Ikona Operations Diagnostic assesses
Four parallel threads, each benchmarked against our Ground Truth framework. Each combines technical review with practitioner-led interview evidence, structured so your service platforms can consume the output directly.
How your tiered service actually works, not how the playbook says it works. Where handoffs break, where tier boundaries are fuzzy, and where the operating model has drifted from the design. The thread that separates the service you are running from the service you think you are running.
The tacit knowledge your function runs on that nobody has ever written down. The workarounds your tenured agents carry in their heads. The judgment calls between a resolved case and an escalated one. ServiceNow, Leena AI, and every other agentic platform needs this layer to scale, and it is the layer Ikona is built to capture.
The case management platform, the portal, the knowledge base, and the actual flow of data through HRIS and adjacent systems. A technical assessment, not a vendor inventory. The thread that determines whether your next round of automation has anything usable to work with.
What you measure, what your executives measure, and whether those match. Where your SLAs and CSAT scores are producing the right incentives and where they are producing the wrong ones. Whether the governance around the function is calibrated to the new mandate or still running on the old one.
Platform-ready output
We ship findings as JSON, markdown, and tagged structured text that drops directly into ServiceNow knowledge articles, Leena AI training sets, Workday Help topics, or the retrieval layer of whichever agentic tool you are scaling. Platform-agnostic because the knowledge is the asset.
Delivered as an intelligence module your function can keep querying. The knowledge base persists and compounds.
Why this is possible
The HR operations market is full of maturity models. SSON, Hackett, APQC, Everest: all publish frameworks that benchmark your function against a generic industry reference. They produce scorecards. The Ikona Operations Diagnostic produces a current-state assessment of your specific function against its specific mandate.
Capture
The underlying methodology (the Ikona Systems Diagnostic) uses sequential trace probing: we walk experienced practitioners through every screen, every handoff, every decision point as if they were training a new colleague. It captures the operational detail your playbooks never contained. Purpose-built for the knowledge your platform vendors cannot give you.
Activation
The format it ships in (ServiceNow KB, Leena AI training set, Workday Help topic, a retrieval-layer feed) is plumbing. The diagnostic produces the asset once; your platforms consume it however they need. No vendor dependency, no re-capture when you switch tools.
Practitioners
Our founders did not run service centers — they ran people analytics and HR technology at Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Meta. What Ikona is uniquely built for is capturing the tacit operational knowledge your tenured agents carry and turning it into something platforms, knowledge bases, and AI agents can consume. That is a different capability from running the operation, and it is the one your operators are least resourced to do for themselves.
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
The most common engagement we run for shared services leaders. Every agentic platform performs at demo level and plateaus when the tacit knowledge your agents need was never documented. Your vendor cannot solve that. The knowledge is yours. The Ikona Operations Diagnostic captures it, structures it, and produces the inputs your platform needs to scale. We are the layer underneath the layer you just bought.
Implementation partners are paid to stand up the platform, configure the workflows, and train your admins. That is a different skill from eliciting and structuring the undocumented operational knowledge your agents carry. We are not replacing your implementation partner — we are supplying the corpus they need before their configuration can scale past pilot. Most of our shared services engagements run alongside an active implementation.
Because a baseline you do not capture is a baseline you cannot prove. If you pivot, consolidate platforms, or scale an agentic tool without a rigorous current-state snapshot, you lose the ability to measure what changed and what is attributable to the investment. Every month you wait is a month of change on top of a baseline nobody captured.
SSON, Hackett, and APQC score your function against an industry benchmark and produce a percentile report. The Ikona Operations Diagnostic assesses your specific function against its specific mandate and its specific executive audience. The service model thread diagnoses how your agents actually operate. The governance thread asks whether your measurement matches your executives’ questions, not an industry rubric. Benchmarks rank you; evidence lets you act.
BPO partners are valuable for execution; their documentation incentives are different from ours. Deliverables inside a BPO contract typically capture what the playbook says, not what the agents actually do. Our methodology interviews the people who do the work and triangulates across dozens of them, with every fact traceable to a specific conversation. That is auditable evidence your governance team can defend.
We make the tacit knowledge explicit — in the formats your platforms can consume.
Thirty minutes with a founder. No deck. No pitch. A conversation about where your function actually stands and where the diagnostic fits.
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