CHRO SA speaks to founder and CEO Ishmael Dube about their unique value proposition.
Human capital software provider iStratgo equips businesses with all the tools they need to improve employee performance, increase workforce engagement, and gauge employee performance, among other things. The platform has even been lauded by FinancesOnline, a top review platform for B2B software systems, for delivering on its value proposition. In this article, we speak to iStratgo founder and CEO Ishmael Dube about what makes the company so special and why they signed up for HR Indaba Africa 2019, which will be hosted at the Sandton Convention Centre on 13 and 14 October.
What does your company do, how long has it been around and what was the reason for starting the company?
iStratgo is a software-as-a-service business founded in 2012 with the purpose of helping organisations simplify complicated HR and performance management tasks, by automating manual and cumbersome processes.
We believe that too many HR Professionals are bogged down with manual transactional processes that can be easily automated by computers. iStratgo uses analytics to provide organisations with a holistic view of people, performance and talent insights via dashboards and reports, allowing HR practitioners to focus on interacting directly with the people in their organisations.
iStratgo’s niche market is made up of small and medium organisations with up to 1000 employees which are using manual spreadsheets for HR and performance management processes. We estimate this market to made up of at least 100 000 organisations in South Africa alone. The typical user profile is an HR Manager who is managing up to 1000 employees and running leave, training, people and performance management processes and reports on MS Excel templates.
How do you differentiate yourselves from other competitors in your space?
iStratgo has a simple and easy to use interface. It offers more features and functionality for a fraction of the price for the small and medium organisations market. We offer quick onboarding whereby the iStratgo team can get a client up and running in less than two weeks by using bulk update functionality and we also deliver an update every two weeks to cater for customised requirements.
iStratgo is different because it is on the cutting of innovation and is always looking for better ways to build, implement, market and sell technology. Innovations in the pipeline include a new reward system which involves earning points for specific actions (Gamification) within the system which can be used to buy vouchers, park run entries, gym membership and so forth. We also plan on developing an integration to wellness apps in order to give a holistic view of employee wellbeing as well and instant feedback and chat function, which will allow organisations to meet the Generation Y and X connectedness needs. In the near future, the system will be integrated with insurance and medical aid administrators to provide better personalisation of employee benefits. Lastly, we plan to introduce the first pre-paid software purchase model.
Why have you signed up for the HR Indaba and what should attendees look forward to seeing from you at the event?
We signed up for the HR Indaba because we believe it is a great platform to connect with HR Professionals to better understand their main pain areas whilst giving them an opportunity to interact with new cutting-edge technology.
