<p>As I attended the E2 conference in Boston this week, I noticed that the space seems to be headed for the niches, looking for smaller departmental use cases, rather than a bigger, all-encompassing enterprise communications tool.</p><p>While that might help make the sale more palatable, you have to wonder if instead of breaking down information silos as it has purported to do all these years, it will just create new ones.</p><p>As Alistair Rennie, general manager of collaboration services at IBM, put it while speaking on the Social Panel this week at the conference, "There has to be a business purpose. Enterprise Social] has to solve [a problem], and it doesn't have to be capital T transformation; it can be small t." And what he means by that is enterprise social doesn't have to solve an enterprise-wide communication problem. It could solve a problem in just one small area.</p><p>Matt Tucker, co-founder and CTO of Jive, speaking on the same panel, put it slightly differently, although he made off with the idea that it has to have a business purpose as a kind of Duh! statement. "There are all sorts of ways to start social business initiatives. What specific uses cases do you have? How do you measure them and what value are you hoping to achieve? Sometimes we are grooving with the customer and then sometimes it's a blank stare."</p><p><a href="http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/story/enterprise-social-heads-niches/2013-06-19">Keep reading...</a></p>