Profits are shaky.
Stock markets are nervous.
Businesses are cutting spending. It's clear we're in for slower growth, at the least, and possibly worse. Not only that, but free office coffee will be abandoned. Trained to salute such emphatic directives as a job protection strategy, the diligent IT project manager charges off to the IT business case team to announce that intangibles are henceforth banished from all justifications. It's hard dollar savings, bunkie, or nothing.