Brian Jolley

Making Complex Things Clear

Salt Lake City, Utah
linkedin.com/in/brian-jolley

That’s the thread through everything I do. Whether I’m explaining to a C-suite why their departments can’t coordinate, showing a small business owner why AI agents can’t find their website, or writing a book that takes on a famously misunderstood text — the work is the same. Take something tangled, find the structure inside it, and make it visible to the people who need to see it.

Right now that skill is applied in two domains:

AI Visibility

I co-founded Found for AI (foundforai.com) with Dustin Crump. We help businesses become findable by AI agents — the systems that increasingly answer questions, make recommendations, and act on behalf of real customers. I build the tooling, run the audits, write the structured data, and publish on how AI access works at the technical level. This is not a side interest. I operate a custom AI development environment daily, maintain a production content pipeline for client sites, and have published a three-post series on AI access barriers. My professional positions are grounded in cited research and enforced as rules in my own tooling.

Enterprise Alignment

For eight years as a director at Western Governors University — the nation’s largest degree-granting institution — I built the systems that aligned siloed departments, standardized processes across the organization, and created measurable accountability where none existed. I drove the adoption of ServiceNow’s Common Services Data Model, created a scorecard system that cut outage resolution times from hundreds of hours to under two, and led cross-departmental governance that reached C-suite level. I was so far ahead of ServiceNow’s own CSDM roadmap that their product team adopted terms and ideas from our work.

I left WGU in August 2024. The most important thing I learned there is that organizational fracturing is an executive problem — departments can’t solve it from within because they’re too invested in their own priorities. That insight shapes everything I do now. Whether the system is an enterprise or a website, the diagnosis is the same: fragmentation creates friction, alignment creates value, and someone has to make the structure visible before anyone can fix it.

How I Work

Systems thinking: I see how puzzle pieces fit together — how one process feeds another, what the inputs and outputs are, where ownership is unclear, and what breaks when nobody coordinates the handoffs.
Relational intelligence: I lead through trust, not authority. When a group of WGU employees was asked to name a leader with emotional intelligence, they unanimously named me. That wasn’t solicited.
Aspirational accountability: The scorecard system I built gave high-performing teams more autonomy and struggling teams more support. “More freedom” and “more help” produce a different culture than “rewards” and “consequences.”
Direct communication: I have a computer engineering degree and speak tech. I also speak in plain language to executives who don’t. My career has been spent going between those groups — translating needs, surfacing assumptions, and making sure everyone is solving the same problem.
Intellectual honesty: I will tell you what I don’t know. I will tell you when your idea is half-baked. I have no interest in telling people what they want to hear — I care about what they probably need to hear.

What I’ve Built

Scorecards — Devised a behavioral-economics-inspired scoring system for dev teams that cut average outage resolution time from hundreds of hours to under two. Adopted across IT, then C-suite, then university-wide.
Directors’ Closure Review — Established a cross-functional director panel for high-severity outage root cause analysis. Created accountability for follow-through, surfaced systemic issues across department boundaries, and required VP-to-VP escalation when root causes originated outside IT.
Outage Response — Replaced a fragmented, ad-hoc process with a single standardized protocol: one ticketing system, one escalation path (5–10 minute intervals up to the CIO), one communication channel, one set of metrics, one training module.
Common Services Data Model — Championed and implemented ServiceNow’s CSDM across the university. Built so far ahead of ServiceNow’s roadmap that their product team adopted terms and ideas from our work. Invited to present to other ServiceNow academic clients.
SMS Rollout — Integrated SMS messaging across five platforms (ServiceNow, Salesforce, Genesys Cloud, Teams, and the phone system) for a university that had no teacher-to-student messaging system. Solved for privacy, routing, broadcast, and organizational alignment.
QA Transformation — Built software quality assurance practices from near-zero. Used control over the test gate — no test results, no deployment — to force discipline upstream through engineering and product. Secured a dedicated stabilization quarter.
Found for AI — Co-founded an AI visibility consultancy. Built a custom AI development environment, production content pipeline, audit tools, and specialized agents. Client results include a 34-to-74 visibility score improvement in 15 minutes.

The Book

Evolving Awareness: Why Kindness Matters — published October 2025 via Amazon KDP. Written during a 2024 sabbatical. A work of nonfiction reinterpreting the first three chapters of Genesis as an allegory for the evolution of consciousness. Evidence of the ability to research, structure, and complete a long-form intellectual project from concept to publication.

Leadership Testimonial

“[A group of employees] felt the leaders did not adequately care for the careers of their people, nor did they listen to, or respect them. I asked the group who they felt was a good leader at WGU with emotional intelligence. They all responded, ‘Brian Jolley!’ They said that you take care of your people, respect them as people and as experts, and listen to their ideas.”
— Stephen Herzig, VP of Enterprise Solutions, Western Governors University

Education & Certifications

BS, Computer Engineering — University of Utah, 2002
MA, Industrial Design — Academy of Art University (coursework 2009–2011)
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
ITIL 4 · Prosci Certified Change Manager · Scrum and Agile

Tools & Technologies

Enterprise: ServiceNow (CSDM, ITSM, ITOM, HRSD, CSM), Genesys Cloud, Workday, Salesforce, Jira, Confluence

AI & Development: Claude Code, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, MCP integrations, JSON-LD/Schema.org, llms.txt, IndexNow, GitHub, Linux

Data & Testing: Grafana, Datadog, Tableau, PowerBI, JMeter, Selenium, Playwright, k6

Languages: English (native), Brazilian Portuguese (fluent), SQL, JavaScript

Personal

Published author (Evolving Awareness: Why Kindness Matters, 2025). Fluent in Brazilian Portuguese. Competitive darts, Formula 1, golf, astronomy, photography. House music, rock, showtunes. International travel and foreign cultures.