One rule of critical thinking, popularized by Ayn Rand, is to be aware of your premises and to check them regularly against reality. A recent Cutter Consortium survey helped us do this in the case of business-IT issues. The value of the survey was demonstrated when I was assured that "everyone has a formal business strategy these days." Without hard data to test this assertion, all of us involved in the discussion would probably have been happy to agree that everyone does indeed have a formal business strategy.