JD Sports Fashion
Head of Business Intelligence
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Head of Business Intelligence
Established in 1981 with a single store in the Northwest of England, the JD Group is a leading omni-channel retailer of Sports Fashion, Outdoors and Gyms with our colleagues working in stores across several retail fascias in many markets around the world. JD Sports Fashion Plc was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1996 and has been a FTSE100 publicly quoted company since 2019 and continues to grow in the UK and internationally. We want to be the leading global omnichannel retailer in the sports and outdoor industry. To be a part of this successful company and help us to achieve this you will have the desire to ingrain our strategic goals of being a people-led, innovative and customer-focused organisation which provides operational excellence whilst identifying new areas of growth as part of our day to day objectives.
We are seeking a visionary, delivery-focused Head of Business Intelligence to define and lead the transformation of reporting, dashboards, and self-service analytics across the JD Group. Reporting to the Group Director of Data & AI, this role is central to creating a scalable, secure, and modern BI estate that accelerates data-driven decision making and supports JD’s ongoing digital and AI-enabled transformation.
This role is based out of our Bury office with the expectation that the successful candidate will be in the office 4 days a week, leading a BI function of 15+ within the wider Data & AI organisation, shaping the strategic direction, capability, standards, and operational excellence of BI across the group. You will ensure JD delivers consistent, high-quality dashboards and reporting, while empowering teams across the business with intuitive, governed self-service analytics. Working closely with Data Engineering, Architecture, and Data Science, you will be responsible for ensuring data within our Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environment is surfaced in accessible, performant, and trusted ways. You will play a key role in developing and evolving a modern data ecosystem that enhances decision-making and supports JD’s global growth.
Responsibilities:
Strategic Leadership
- Define and deliver JD’s BI strategy, including a clear roadmap for modernisation, standardisation, and consolidation of existing BI solutions
- Lead the unification of JD’s BI estate (e.g., Power BI, Looker, ThoughtSpot, Oracle BI) into a single enterprise platform aligned to stakeholder needs and long-term strategy
- Establish BI architecture principles, including semantic layers, shared datasets, reporting standards, and self-service frameworks
- Act as a senior leader in cross-functional forums, influencing strategy and decision-making using actionable insight and BI best practices
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Leadership & Stakeholder Management
- Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of BI professionals, setting clear expectations and fostering a culture of excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement
- Establish clear progression pathways, focused skill development, and a culture of innovation and accountability
- Build trusted relationships with senior business leaders, acting as a strategic partner to help teams utilise data effectively and make informed decisions
- Own team capacity planning, workload management, and prioritisation to ensure efficient delivery against business demand
- Champion BI capability uplift across the organisation, enabling teams to adopt self-service analytics confidently and responsibly
Reporting & Analytics Delivery
- Oversee the design, development, and optimisation of dashboards, reporting pipelines, and BI products, ensuring they are accurate, performant, and aligned to business needs
- Ensure BI solutions meet enterprise standards for reliability, scalability, and user experience while championing best practices in data visualisation and storytelling
- Own the lifecycle of BI products, from discovery through delivery to continuous improvement, ensuring ongoing value and adoption
- Lead quality assurance processes to guarantee data accuracy, consistency, and trustworthiness across all BI outputs
Data Governance & Best Practice
- Partner with Data Engineering, Data Governance, and Data Science to ensure BI consumption layers are built on robust, governed, well-modelled data assets
- Drive adoption of standardised semantic models, shared datasets, and governed self-service analytics frameworks across the organisation
- Define and maintain BI standards, documentation, and policies to ensure consistency, compliance, and long-term maintainability
- Ensure data quality issues impacting BI products are proactively identified, monitored, and addressed through appropriate governance processes
Role Objectives & KPIs
- Deliver a unified, modern BI platform and reduce duplication across the BI estate
- Increase adoption of governed self-service analytics across the organisation
- Improve the accuracy, trust, and performance of all dashboards and BI products
- Strengthen BI capability through team development, standards, and best practice frameworks
- Ensure BI outputs are built on well-modelled, high-quality, governed data assets
- Improved productivity and engagement across Business Intelligence teams
- Build strong senior-level relationships to ensure BI consistently informs strategic decision-making
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Skills and Experience:
- Significant senior-level experience in Business Intelligence leadership roles (Head, Director, or equivalent) within fast-paced, complex organisations
- At least five years’ experience managing and developing high-performing BI teams
- Deep expertise in modern BI tools, particularly Power BI and Looker; experience with LookML is advantageous
- Strong working knowledge of SQL, Python, and Google Analytics
- Solid understanding of data modelling, semantic layers, metadata management, and analytics architecture
- Demonstrable experience migrating BI platforms or consolidating BI estates with minimal business disruption and strong stakeholder engagement
- Proven ability to coach and mentor technical teams, raising capability and embedding high delivery standards
- Skilled at simplifying complexity and embedding standards that balance technical rigour with business value and cost
- Familiarity with AI-enabled analytics and natural language query tooling to broaden self-service accessibility, enabling less technically trained Business teams to make data-driven decisions at speed
- Effective communicator who can influence and engage senior stakeholders across business and technology domains who can provide authoritative guidance
- Experience in large scale, multi-brand, or global enterprises; retail experience is advantageous
- Demonstrated ability to learn and adopt new technologies, especially emerging AI capabilities
- Strong leadership and people development skills to develop a growing team of business intelligence professionals and foster the adoption of data-driven decision-making across the business
We know our colleagues work tirelessly to make JD Sports the success it is today and in turn, we offer them some amazing benefits including staff Discount on JD Group and other brands within the organisation and personal development opportunities to learn and develop at work.
Thank you for your time #JD
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