When our members worked on Pakistan's first multimedia CD-ROM for IBM, they had never done anything of the kind before. Armed with passion and a burning desire to create great work, they then went on to produce cutting-edge new-media products for a number of organizations. However, the IBM CD, the Art CD for ABN-AMRO, and the internationally acclaimed Faiz CD would not have been what they were without the professionalism and dedication that they brought into the subjects via research and immense hard work.

We have always gone beyond what is expected and invest a great deal of time in understanding the nature of our client's business before and during development. This often involves working overtime, on weekends, and at home. Local companies do not usually value our level of commitment but we have never allowed that to deter us.

As believers in the concept of Learning Organizations, we turn every assignment into a growth experience for our team. For example, working on the LBPL (Lever Brothers Pakistan Limited) Competency Development Project has taught each one of us numerous aspects of management that have greatly enhanced our understanding of large organizations. All the animations, puzzles, and interactive modules have been carefully thought out, after understanding the content. This is, to a great extent, a result of the active involvement of our team members in teaching and training at higher education and corporate levels.

While most other companies often do not even bother to absorb the material provided to them by clients, being content to churn out electronic page-turners, we suggest improvements and methodologies to increase effectiveness. Our brainstorming sessions are intensive and incorporate several facets of the core ideas.

While we are extremely proficient in all matters technical, we are very committed to issues that most IT companies do not even bother about. Interface Design and Usability, Writing for the New Media, Branding and Advertising in the New Economy, Effective Communication, and Compelling Design, are a few areas that we link directly to our core work.

A young person working at a competitive company recently stated that there is no requirement for graphic designers in Internet companies as programmers can do the same job. Merely knowing how to manipulate images in Adobe Photoshop does not translate into understanding the principles of design. After all, we would not expect a graphic designer to be able to construct databases after reading a couple of books and dabbling with Microsoft Access for a few hours.

It would be relevant to point out that in the absence of the availability of courses in the above mentioned areas in Pakistan, we have invested heavily in our team taking related self-paced courses and attending international seminars and workshops. In fact, our CEO has developed content and courses in these disciplines for delivery at local universities and institutes. In addition, he set up the Department of New Media at Hamdard University where he also led seminars on Learning Sciences.

Aspects of life not linked specifically to our work are equally important. We conduct in-house multi-disciplinary lectures and sessions to develop and enhance the mindset of our team. Ranging from developing among our team an understanding of media, itself, to analyzing the impact of Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com) on retailing, we believe that well-rounded individuals have to look beyond their specific fields of work. Inspiration must be drawn from a variety of sources and everyone is encouraged to unzip their minds.

Our continuing mission is to merge the disciplines of science and humanities to produce a workforce that is passionate and sensitive about issues that affect society: a few of us at BITS are working on websites and other projects that cover social and human rights issues and help introduce the visions and writings of great minds (such as those of the recently deceased Dr. Eqbal Ahmad) to the millions who are oblivious to this.

Technical competence is, however, the obvious key to our success and our team is accomplished in the major areas of new media and web development.

In addition to technical areas, our expertise includes traditional photography and audio-visual technologies with a growing emphasis on their increasing computer-based execution.

Ongoing technical training and skills development is integral to our philosophy and our team has constant access to the Internet, subscriptions to industry journals, magazines, and books, and are also sent to conferences all over the world. Proactive behaviour is encouraged and it is mandatory for individuals to become responsible for their own learning by conducting research, subscribing to user groups, and participating in discussion forums.