Strategy.
Where your function is aligned with what the executives above you actually need, and where it is not. The thread that determines whether the rest of the portfolio is pulling in the right direction.
For the workforce systems leader
One role. Six functions.No capacity for discovery.We do the archaeology.
You own six functions’ worth of scope — strategy, operations, technology, data, analytics, AI — and every one of them needs discovery before it can move. Your team has one quarter of discovery capacity, total, and you need to spend it on execution, not archaeology. We do the archaeology. You get ongoing access to a knowledge store that grounds every initiative in your portfolio.
Here is how the diagnostic works.
Built by practitioners from the people analytics and HR technology functions at Amazon, Meta, Nike, Expedia, and One Model.
The situation
You own the widest scope in HR and the least visibility into how it actually performs.
Your portfolio covers more ground than any other function inside HR. Strategy, operations, technology, data, analytics, AI. In most organizations that scope was assembled by consolidation rather than design, and the instrumentation never caught up. You know what each piece is supposed to do. You cannot show how the pieces actually perform together.
What your executives ultimately buy from you are four capabilities. AI that works. Automation that holds. Analytics that land with decision-makers. Audit that holds up in front of the regulator, the CFO, or the board. Integrated questions. No single team inside your portfolio can answer them.
The Ikona Systems Diagnostic was built for this level of integration. It runs across the full scope of your function, benchmarks against our Ground Truth framework, and produces the evidence base your executives are asking for.
If an integrator is already building against your portfolio:
See glove-on-hand consulting
What the ISD assesses
The ISD runs across the scope your role actually covers.
Five parallel threads, each benchmarked against our Ground Truth framework. The standard matrix covers most of what a Workforce Systems Leader owns. When the question sits outside it, we build a custom matrix.
Operations.
How the function actually runs. Staffing, structure, governance, delivery cadence. What your team is capable of today, at current capacity, before you add more work to the queue.
Technology.
The state of the stack and the gap between what the architecture supports today and what your next two years of use cases will demand. A technical assessment, not a vendor inventory.
Data.
The data supply chain that feeds the function. Where it originates, where it breaks, where it compounds, and whether the governance around it survives regulator scrutiny.
Analytics.
The analytical work your function ships: dashboards, models, research, reports. Methods benchmarked against the questions being asked; products benchmarked against whether their audiences are actually using them.
AI foundation
AI runs across all five threads.
The Ikona AI Diagnostic assesses AI readiness at every layer (strategy, operations, technology, data, analytics) so the answer you take to the CFO is an AI position grounded in how the rest of your function already runs. Delivered as an intelligence module your function can keep querying, benchmarked against our Ground Truth framework.
Why this is possible
The ISD is the foundation. The intelligence modules build off it.
The ISD is the foundational module in an intelligence platform. The knowledge base it produces persists. Every subsequent module (business cases, transformation roadmaps, opportunity charters, operating model designs) draws from that same foundation. The investment compounds. The second and third questions cost a fraction of the first.
Foundation
One capture. Many downstream modules.
The ISD runs the full capture once, through structured stakeholder interviews scoped to your organization. The resulting knowledge base becomes the substrate for every subsequent module: a business case for a Workday investment, an opportunity charter, an operating model redesign. You do not pay to rediscover the organization every time a new question arrives.
Scope
The standard matrix, or a custom one.
The standard five-thread ISD already covers most of what a Workforce Systems Leader owns. When the research question sits outside that scope, we decompose it into its component parts and build a purpose-fit matrix. Both paths produce the same output: a structured knowledge base and the activation modules that draw from it.
Practitioners
Designed by people who have run this scope.
Our founders have operated the functions you are now consolidating, at the scale you are now running — Amazon, Google, Facebook, and One Model. That experience shapes how the interviews are conducted and how the business case reads when it reaches the CFO.
Practitioners, not generalists
We have run the scope you are running.
Ian O'Keefe
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.
Bennet Voorhees
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.
Richard Rosenow
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
A bench deeper than the people in the picture.
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.
Expertise, matched to the question.
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.
Flexibility on your timeline.
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.
One knowledge store, one source of truth.
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 four questions you are about to ask.
Three things. First, our founders have run this scope at Amazon, Google, Facebook, and One Model — we are not re-learning the terrain on your engagement. Second, we do not leave behind a slide deck; we give your team ongoing access to a queryable knowledge store, so every downstream question (a Workday business case, an operating model redesign, an AI opportunity charter) draws from the same evidence without a new statement of work. Third, we compress two years of portfolio discovery into 90 days because the methodology was built for this scope from the beginning rather than adapted from a generic transformation practice.
Hackett and Gartner score your function against a generic industry framework and produce a percentile scorecard. The ISD is a current-state assessment of your specific function, stakeholders, and organizational context. The governance thread diagnoses how decisions actually get made here, not how they should in an ideal model. The technology thread assesses your actual stack, not a reference architecture. Evidence, not a scorecard, structured so your executives can act on it.
Yes. The standard matrix is the most common starting point; it is not the only one. When your question sits outside the default scope, we decompose it into its component parts and build a custom matrix. The underlying instrument (structured stakeholder interviews captured into a persistent knowledge base) is the same. The matrix is what we calibrate to your question.
Underneath them. Your teams continue to own their domains, roadmaps, and delivery. The ISD gives you, at the Workforce Systems Leader level, the integrated view across all of it that your individual teams cannot produce on their own. The knowledge base stays live for your function. Your teams gain access to an asset they can draw from.
Your team is not resourced for the archaeology.
That is exactly what we do.
Thirty minutes with a founder who has run this scope. No deck. No pitch.