Ingeo Electronic Recording Case Studies
Thurston County, Washington

Thurston County has long been seen as a leader in Washington, testing and adopting new technologies and procedures in areas such as financial reporting, vehicle licensing, elections and records. For example, the county was the first to install the CRIS+plus archival and storage system from Eagle Computer Systems (ECS), which has since been adopted by 22 counties across the state. Thurston was also the first county in Washington to implement a full-fledged electronic recording solution: Ingeo's Electronic Recording System. On one hand, the county's "early adopter" status comes from a desire to provide the best customer service to its constituents. On the other hand, the county's trailblazing character is born out of necessity.

The population in Thurston County has more than doubled in the past decade, dramatically increasing the volume of land records handled by the auditor's office. In spite of this, the county's auditing staff is actually smaller today than it was in the 1970s. Thurston's county auditor, Kim Wyman, notes that this is only possible through automation technology. According to Wyman, the mandate from taxpayers to do more, in less time, with fewer people, "more than justifies Thurston's partnership with Ingeo."

Ingeo's Electronic Recording System is a soup-to-nuts solution for the digital creation and processing of land records, featuring components for both document preparation and document recording. ePrepare, the tool for document originators, enables users to digitally create, sign, notarize, and transmit legally binding digital documents. eRecord, the system for government agencies, allows recording offices to electronically receive, validate, and endorse incoming documents, handing them off to existing indexing and archive systems.

The Thurston County Auditor's Office recorded almost 9,500 release documents in 2000, and expects to easily top that number in 2001. Despite this volume of documents, the goal of the pilot project was to install a system to create, submit and record 250 lien release documents (also known as reconveyances)—to determine whether the system was robust enough for day-to-day use in a fairly typical county installation.

Planning and preparation

In preparation for the pilot, Ingeo's system designers studied the workflow at both title company and county offices. It was critical that the electronic and manual processes follow the same steps and produce functionally identical results. Since title companies are the auditor's main clientele, the implementation team was joined by representatives from Thurston County's three largest title companies: Pioneer Title Company of Olympia, Transnation Title, and Chicago Title. Team members worked together to draft lien release templates that would meet the needs and requirements of both title companies and county auditors.

Thurston County uses CRIS+plus from ECS to handle document imaging, cashiering, and storage. Ingeo and ECS collaborated to find the best way for the two systems to communicate. Eventually, this working relationship developed into a full-fledged partnership.

Implementation at Thurston County offices

At the county auditor's offices, team members installed an eRecord server to receive and process electronically submitted documents. The server's hardware consisted of a Dell PowerEdge server with dual 800 mHz Pentium III processors, 512 megabytes of RAM, and ample hard disk space for storing electronically recorded documents. Ingeo engineers configured the eRecord software, plus other tools from ECS that provide additional electronic recording functions.

Since eRecord and ePrepare communicate with one another over the Internet, the eRecord server was equipped with its own firewall system, protecting it from unauthorized access. The server also needed a digital certificate to enable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) transmission. SSL technology encrypts incoming and outgoing data, ensuring that information being passed back and forth is not compromised by outside parties. In addition, Ingeo team members helped the county auditing staff obtain a digital certificate in behalf of auditor Kim Wyman, to allow them to digitally sign lien documents during the endorsement process.

Finally, eRecord was configured to share data with CRIS+plus. Both products use the Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard to define the structured information they process. Even so, full integration of CRIS+plus and eRecord took almost three months of coordinated effort. The result is an elegant combination of two separate systems from two different companies—easily passing information back and forth—each performing the functions for which it was designed.

Implementation at title companies' offices

In comparison to the work required at the county offices, installation of Ingeo's ePrepare component was simple. Since ePrepare uses an application service provider (ASP) model, client operations are done within a standard web browser, with information processed by remote servers. Ingeo verified that the workstations to be used with ePrepare met the required hardware specifications, checked that the required web browser was installed and working properly, and made sure that the document templates were functioning correctly.

The only actual installation was the Ingeo Client Signing Plug-in, which gives web browsers access to the tools that enable digital signatures and digital notaries. Ingeo helped title company signers and notaries obtain digital certificates and private keys so they could create and validate digital signatures. Once the browsers, plug-ins, certificates, and keys were in place, the title companies were ready to create and submit documents.

Going live

The Ingeo Electronic Recording System went live in Thurston County on Friday, April 13, 2001, and ran for 72 business days. By the time the eRecord server went offline on Friday, July 20, the system had processed 230 reconveyance documents. Though this was a pilot project—a "rubber meets the road" test of fully paperless recording—all of the documents endorsed during the pilot were fully valid and legally binding.

To gauge the usefulness of the Electronic Recording System as an everyday tool in both private and public business settings, the system was allowed to run by itself unless circumstances required intervention. The process went remarkably smoothly—the novelty eventually wore off and became just another office routine.

Pilot results

As with any automated process, one of the best ways to view this pilot project is by examining statistics of key elements:

• Title company participation—The three companies varied drastically in document volume, with Pioneer Title and Chicago Title processing 112 and 95 documents each, and Transnation Title processing just 23.
• Document preparation time—Title company employees indicated that they generally spent a total of about 2-5 minutes actually working with each document.
• County server volume—The county's eRecord server processed an average of 2.92 documents per day—with essentially no human interaction.
• Document recording time—The average recording time was 25 seconds from start to finish.This means the server was working at 0.02% of its full capacity. At less than half a minute per document, a server could be expected to handle more than 1,100 documents in an 8-hour day.

Title company response

Ingeo's ePrepare product was designed to automate a workflow that has been the standard for centuries. The electronic and manual processes are essentially the same, except that e-documents don't need to be "papered out" and hand-carried to the county office. Since most paper reconveyances are already generated by computer, the only differences seen in the electronic process are a slightly different interface, digital signing software, and role-based processing. Title companies reported that using ePrepare to create digital documents was no more difficult than performing the same task using more traditional tools.

Because ePrepare is a server-based system that controls workflow remotely, this introduces the possibility of secure, distributed access to documents and preparation tools. Several title company employees were able to create and process reconveyances from the convenience of their homes, but not one document was tampered with during the pilot project. This demonstrates that the safeguards built into the Electronic Recording System were able to successfully protect documents and transactions while company networks remained safe and secure.

While initial feedback indicates that the county sees great benefits from document automation in terms of measurable time and cost savings, title companies also reap rewards in the form of streamlined workflow, document controls, and convenience. According to Bill Jones, vice president of Pioneer Title, "The ability to process a recording from your desk is huge."

Learning for the future

Now that the pilot project is complete, the next stage will involve identifying ways Ingeo's Electronic Recording System can evolve to better meet the current and future needs of its users. For the pilot, Ingeo focused on the deed of reconveyance, a relatively simple document that can easily be generated from a template. However, the number one request—one that Ingeo has implemented in subsequent releases of the Electronic Recording System—is to enable the creation and recording of more time-sensitive documents that can truly take advantage of the quick turnaround that results from using ePrepare and eRecord.

Additional requests from participating title companies include features already either implemented or in development for future releases of Ingeo's system: the capability to handle batches of documents, the ability to accommodate signatures from the general public, and the capacity to export documents to various formats for printing and e-mailing. Through careful follow-up interviews, Ingeo has established that e-recording is a valuable improvement in both the public and private sectors. If counties offer digital recording, title companies and financial institutions will use this service to increase recording speed and enhance their bottom line.

In this pilot project, Ingeo successfully updated a process that has been performed manually for centuries. Electronic recording has been validated as a quick, convenient, and safe alternative to traditional paper recording. Ingeo's Electronic Recording System has also been proven as an effective tool for everyday workflow in title companies and county offices. Work is now underway in Thurston County to implement Ingeo's system as a permanent tool for digital commerce. Ingeo expects that subsequent installations and new versions of its e-recording solution will both benefit from the experience with the Thurston County pilot project.

What's New?

If you don't know me, or don't know me well, you can get a pretty good picture of who I am and what I do from snooping around in this site.

How I pay the bills:
DriveTime
Eclectic Interactive

What I do for fun:
Equinox
Spirit of Phoenix