Statewide Real and Personal Property Records Indexing & Imaging

Phil Kobierowski has been a consulting Project Manager for the Georgia Superior Court Clerks' Cooperative Authority (GSCCCA): a state authority created by the Georgia General Assembly. Phil joined the GSCCCA in 1996. His initial responsibility was the design and implementation of the 'Georgia Consolidated Real Estate Indexes Project' - a leading edge, ambitious undertaking mandated by Georgia state legislation. This project is the collection of all real estate documents filed and indexed at the Superior Court Clerks's offices of all 159 Georgia counties.

Currently this system collects index data daily from every county along with the associated images of the actual real estate documents. The information is made available to the public and to county officials both by PCs installed in every courthouse (by the GSCCCA) and through the internet. The system contains data for all counties since 1999 to present, and has a growing amount of historical data for years 1993-1999. Additionally, the System is collecting data for a new Statewide Automated Lien Indexing system and will soon have a newly created Statewide Plat Information System.

Through the development of this project, Phil's responsibilities required him to:

1. Understand the operations and data collection procedures at various courthouses throughout the state along with the variations and purpose of all the Real Estate documents filed there.
2. Oversee development of the "State of Georgia Real and Personal Property Indexing Standards": a document to assure that names and property information get indexed from real estate documents, statewide, using a consistent set of rules so that the documents will be found for title examinations etc when searching the indexes. These Standards are required to be followed by all Clerks of Superior Court in Georgia for all Liens, Deeds, and Plats documents filed. (These Standards are also used by many Clerks for indexing Civil and Criminal court information.)
3. Develop the requirements and design of the computer system that collects and manages data received from throughout the state.
4. Procure the statewide collection computer system via competitive RFP process, and perform system acceptance testing.
5. Provide strategic input for the design and procurement of a modern electronic network to all courthouses for the transfer of data, e-mail, and internet access, for this and other GSCCCA projects.
6. Develop a set of requirements that local real estate indexing systems must abide by in order have uniform system features and functionality throughout the state, and to exchange data with the central collection system.
7. Function as a compliance and certification officer inspecting the indexing and document/image management systems of all vendors wishing to do business with Clerks of Superior Court in Georgia. Such inspections are necessary to assure that systems in Georgia would have consistent features and functionality for Clerks and perform necessary data-entry and data-extraction functions to deliver the appropriate real estate information to the statewide central collection system. (The list of vendors certified by Phil for GSCCCA compliance is at http://www.gsccca.org/Projects/vendors.asp.