This is Technology Bites, episode 26 for September 3rd, 2023.
Technology Bites is a microcast where I share my brief insights on an interesting technology.
My name is Joel.
Enjoy.
And here we go.
This week I’m going to do a little bit of rambling and I don’t have any real specifics on this topic outside of what I’ve used here in the most recent past and will be using in the not too distant future.
And that is electronic document signing.
My wife and I are going through a process of buying a house and so if you have done that anytime in your history, you know that there is much paperwork that goes with that.
And it has been a while.
My wife and I bought a house when we first got married and have not bought another since we sold that house.
So it’s been about 25 years since we’ve purchased our first house and so it’s almost like we are first-time buyers.
In fact, in the eyes of the law, we are again first-time buyers and there are some benefits to that.
But the reality is that signing of paperwork, documentation process flow, has significantly changed in the 25 years since we did it last.
And this is not just in home buying, it’s in car buying, it’s in anything that needs paperwork for the processes to be completed.
And so as I’ve observed over the weeks as we’re going through these processes, it really just comes in the form of electronic documentation.
We get emails from a variety of sources that say, we need this information from you.
Can you provide this information?
We need you to sign these documents.
And so companies have developed systems, DocuSign and many others, and I’m sorry that I don’t know them right now.
Off the top of my head, I probably should have done some research.
But many people, many companies, I should say, have developed systems that allow documents to be signed in a relatively easy manner.
It provides for remote signing, it provides for opportunities to keep a process moving and to shorten time frames because we are not waiting for physical mail to be delivered or for people to gather in certain places at certain points of time to get documents signed.
And so it provides us either a more simple path for doing complicated paperwork, or maybe it makes it too easy for us to do things that maybe we shouldn’t be doing.
But the reality is, it is an awesome technology.
It is a technology that allows transactions to happen worldwide.
In my case, it’s not very wide at all.
You may have a finance company over here that’s 10 miles away, or your realtor is just a couple miles from you.
It doesn’t mean that it has to be long distance, but the technology of digital document transportation has made it easier for these things to happen in a more timely, more efficient, less cut-down-a-tree type of manner.
And so I think that’s good for the environment as well.
And it’s not always easy, and it is kind of interesting from a signature point of view.
They kind of make up a signature for you, and you hit agree that, yeah, some kind of font that has your name is what you’re going to call your signature.
In the documents that I’ve signed, that signature doesn’t look anything like the one that I use on a regular basis for documents that I have to physically sign.
But even then, in my regular world, in my job, I do reviews for employees, and I do those digitally.
And I actually sign them with my Apple Pencil on my iPad, and I let the employee do the same.
And so it looks just like my signature, but we’re not using any paper to generate those documents.
And to me, I like that.
I am a non-paper kind of guy.
The more that I can do without actually having to handle paper, I think the better off we are.
I think it’s better for the environment.
I think it’s easier to accomplish complicated documentation processes.
And I think it’s more convenient for those involved, all the people involved.
I think it provides for savings of time.
It provides for savings of money.
And it really offers opportunities to make the most of the world in which we live now and the technology that has become available.
And I really appreciate that people are choosing that as a path, even though they might not necessarily embrace technology as a whole.
Because it just shows that they care about the people that they are working with.
And just in the recent documentations and what my wife and I are going through, the seller has a disclosure document that they have to do.
And it’s really a form.
They just go on.
It’s electronic.
You check the box, yes.
You check, no.
There’s places for you to type in some additional information.
And that was not working well for the seller.
Don’t know why.
Don’t know what happened.
But she actually chose to do it on a physical paper.
Printed the form out on her printer, filled it out, hand wrote it.
And then doesn’t have a scanner to scan it back into the system, so just uses her phone to take a picture of every page.
Not a very good picture either, I may add.
You can read the text, but you see a lot of desktop around it.
It’s not very neat.
And yet the documentation signing software sees that still as a piece of paper.
And my wife and I were able to initial and sign all the places on that document that were necessary.
And even those relatively poor pictures from a cell phone of a document used in the processing of home buying and selling was able to be turned back into the digital environment in a relatively simple process.
So I think that this is a technology that will continue to grow.
I think this is a technology that matters.
I think the idea of not generating a lot of paper that must be kept and handled is good.
And we still have a long way to go in that arena.
Because many times, even in this home buying thing, I’m pretty sure somebody is eventually going to print out all that documentation and have paper copies of the entire trail that happened.
I don’t think that should be necessary.
I think all of that should be able to be kept digitally.
We should have places that are allowed to save that, where there’s backups and there’s controls at who can access it and those kind of things.
And I hope eventually we get to that point where we don’t have monstrous levels of files of paperwork that has to be kept somewhere to take up space that someone is paying for.
And that we can start to use the electronic versions of those and save way more documentation in way less space, even though there is space involved in that as well.
So I don’t know necessarily where I’m going with that.
I just wanted to share some rambling thoughts on it.
I think it’s great.
I enjoy every time I get an email that says, please sign this and it opens in a browser and I’m clicking buttons and I don’t have to handle any paper and I return it and they’re happy.
And so I think it’s just good and fun to do.
And I appreciate that level of technology.
If you have any thoughts, the email address for this microcast is technologybytesatmerigfamily.com.
So that’s technologybytesatmerigfamily.com.
Be more than happy to hear any response to your thoughts on this technology and what you think about it as well.
You have been listening to the Technology Bytes microcast.
Until next time, continue enjoying your technology.
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