What do Google, Amazon, Facebook and IGS Have in Common?
Data is their lifeblood
by Jackie Atkins, Ph.D., Director of Science and Education, American Simmental Association International Genetic Solutions (IGS) partner organizations, representing 18.9 million beef cattle, gathered in Bozeman on October 22-24, 2019, for a meeting of the minds. Thirty guests including executive vice presidents, breed improvement staff and consultants, and the IGS Science Team, participated in meetings filled with bigpicture discussions of the power of the IGS collaborative, ideas on how to continue to improve data collection and integration into the genetic evaluation, new ways to benefit from economies of scale within this group and technical updates on the genetic evaluation. Ample time for brainstorming during the meetings led to tangible action items for future developments. Topics included: • The “why” behind IGS by Dr. Wade Shafer • Advice to IGS and its partners for continued success by Dr. Matt Spangler • Updates to the Genetic Evaluation since the first launch of IGS Multi-breed Genetic Evaluation powered by BOLT by Dr. Lauren Hyde • New improvements and developments in genomics by Dr. Mahdi Saatchi • Updates to growth trait predictions by Dr. Bruce Golden • New bull lookup features by Ryan Boldt • Educational awareness efforts for foot/leg assessment by Ryan Boldt Wade Shafer gave a compelling presentation starting with a video of Simon Sinek’s TED talk entitled, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action.” Sinek is the author of the
28 California Cattleman March 2020
book “Start with Why” about how successful companies build their business by starting with the “why” behind what they do instead of the “what.” Sinek talks about “the Golden Circle” with “why” as the bullseye, followed by “how” and the “what” is the outermost circle. Successful leaders and companies start in the center of the circle with “why,” then “how” and finally “what.”
Shafer extrapolated the golden circle principle for IGS.
The “why”=Better serve the beef industry by more effectively leveraging our resource for genetic improvement. The “how”=Leveraging data and technology through massive and unprecedented collaboration. The “what” =The largest and most powerful beef cattle genetic evaluation in the world. Shafer talked about an article in the May, 6, 2017, issue of The Economist about data being the world’s most valuable resource. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft all have something in common with IGS. Data is our lifeblood. The IGS collaboration now has 18.9 million animals and over 230,000 genotypes from 17 different organizations. Not only is it the largest beef cattle database, but it also has a large amount of connectivity among the different organizations. Shafer shared a table of sires (see table on page 30) with progeny from more than one data source. IGS has more than 30,000 sires represented in at least two different databases and nearly 6 million progeny records from these sires. ...CONTINUED ON PAGE 30
