Current Appointment

Brett Young is an Associate Professor of Management Information Systems in the School of Business at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, GA .  He is currently teaching BUSA3100 (intro to MIS), MGMT4620 (System Analysis & Design) and MGMT4650 (International Management of IT) courses.  He is the faculty advisor for registered student organizations The MIS Club and Sigma Beta Delta Honor Society at GGC.  With GGC colleagues Dr. Phillip Hartley and Prof. Jason Gordon, he is a co-founder of GGC’s Center for Emerging Business and Entrepreneurship which provides numerous resources to GGC’s entrepreneurial students.

In 2017, his paper (with Drs. Lars Mathiassen and Elizabeth Davidson) entitled “Inconsistent and Incongruent Frames During IT-enabled Change: An Action Research Study into Sales Process Innovation” was awarded Best Paper of the Year (2016) at Journal of the Association for Information Systems. He was also a researcher on the NSF-funded “Organizational Participation Open Communities Project” (with Matt Germonprez, principal investigator) and previously was Adjunct Professor of Computer Information Systems at Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University.

Industry

Brett received his PhD in Management Information Systems at the Center for Process Innovation (CEPRIN) at Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. Brett also has an MBA in finance from Georgia State University. Before that, Brett was an IT consultant in New York, New York and Angers, France and quality system manager. His undergraduate degree is in Industrial Management from The Culverhouse College of Commerce & Business Administration at The University of Alabama.

For five years in the late 90’s Brett was a principal consultant with Technology Solutions Company (TSC) — a then-publicly-traded business and technology consulting firm — primarily working in the New York City area, Boston, and Angers, France. Brett worked with small teams to employ advanced technologies to develop, customize, and implement enterprise applications software (e.g. Oracle Financials, Geac Smartstream, and PeopleSoft). These implementations streamlined financial reporting and improved enterprise operations for both large and mid-size businesses. Also, as project planning manager at a high-technology client in Angers, France, he interfaced with colleagues across multiple time zones and in multiple European countries. Brett was responsible for managing project planning and business process mapping across multiple business units in one of the largest PeopleSoft projects ever implemented in Europe.

He also worked for two years at Shaw Industries, Inc. where he created and managed applications to measure, analyze, and report quality in a real-time environment and also led his facility’s successful certification in an ISO-9000 based quality standard while supervising a shift of sixteen workers. While working with TSC in New York, Brett completed a graduate level program in information technology and management from New York University. As an undergraduate at The University of Alabama, he won top honors in the field of industrial management, receiving the Outstanding Senior Award in Industrial Management.

CEPRIN

Working with CEPRIN faculty members while at GSU, Brett was involved in three long-term research projects. He has worked with a small minority-owned technology company to help it understand and design processes which would lead to higher user adoption rates of its offerings and with a well-known technology consultancy while investigating the firm’s research process. He has also worked with a publicly-traded high-tech firm in Atlanta over a three-year period to help innovate sales processes. The latter research work is the basis for his doctoral dissertation. While a Ph.D. student at GSU, Brett’s teaching experience included an intro to CIS and ethics of ICT courses.

Brett’s dissertation is titled “The Role of Stakeholder Perceptions During IT-enabled Change: An Investigation of Technology Frames of Reference in a Sales Process Innovation Project.” The study attempts to answer the following research questions: How can Technology Frames of Reference (TFR) be adapted and applied to support action research into IT-enabled change efforts? What was the role of stakeholder perceptions during IT-enabled sales process innovation at VoiceTech? How do stakeholder perceptions evolve and interact with outcomes during IT-enabled change efforts?

While working on his MBA, he worked with CEPRIN professors as a graduate research assistant. His projects included researching outsourcing trends, researching business processes at a large technology research organization, and assisting CEPRIN professors in creating an MBA-level class on process innovation.

Personal

Brett spends his free time reading books (history, investing, and historical fiction) and as much time as possible with his daughters, Olivia and Eliza, and his wife, Jill.