Jay Wardle

Director, Enterprise Data Red Wing Shoe Company

Jay leads the Enterprise Data practice at Red Wing Shoes. He and his global team’s mission is to drive data quality, consistency and reliability between source systems and to analytical models and data lakes. By focusing on core data first, his team enables Business Analysts and Data Scientists to begin their work without recreating common data sets like sales, product and consumer. Meanwhile, this same data and infrastructure also services 500+ stores for their day-to-day reporting needs with a 100% uptime YTD in 2019.  

He serves as the data strategist for the firm’s Strategic Insights and Analytics initiative. Partnering with his peers in Finance and Marketing they are transforming the use of data at ‘The Shoe’ by deploying modern solutions and empowering end-users with greater access to governed data. With this program they have synchronized data between financial and operational reporting systems so that they now tie to the last dollar. This gives users the elusive ‘one source of truth’ many organizations seek and has increased the trust level across executive leadership.

Prior to Red Wing Shoes Jay led Strategic Planning for Target.com and had a long career in consulting with PwC and other boutique firms. His clients included Microsoft, Expedia, KeyBank, Boise Cascade and Keebler/Kellogg’s.

Jay holds an MBA in Marketing from University of Pittsburgh with a BS in Accounting from Miami University (Ohio).