In this context, it mostly means private, permissioned distributed ledgers serving as a fancy distributed, shared database with some business logic built in. The cost and complexity makes some sense when you have several assorted players taking part in various parts of a value stream. Tradionally each has its own slightly unique copy of the data, lots of legacy, integration and conciliation between them. Some scenarios a company appears whose sole purpose is to be a mediator and custodian of this data, adding complexity and cost to the process. This shared database solution allows everyone to have consensus on the rules, the transactions, and the current state of the data, removing lots of complexity and some intermediaries. This shared database could be a mysql, oracle or whatever instance, but blockchain characteristics make it interesting for this use case, when each member of the consortium doesn't necessarily trust each other, you want equal shared ownership of this distributed database instance, and so on.

More generally, modern blockchain technology brings a lot of capabilities besides this replicated, ownerless consensus that personally I see as building blocks for your architecture. Most of them are not necessarily exclusive to blockchain, in fact lots are cryptography capabilities, but are enabled or facilitated by blockchain architecture or by each other. These are things like:

- Immutability, which is the guarantee that you have a historical record of data stored, and it won't be further changed, accidentally or maliciously.

- Notarization, which is the ability to record and identify the authencity of the originator of the information, even if you don't want to reveal the infromation or the originator identity.

- The balance between transparency, anonimity and privacy: you have tools when designing your solution to make all transactions and information trackable or not. For example you can design it so you can record transactions without revealing sender, receiver and values and still guarantee the consistency of the whole, that there's no double spending or creation of resources. Or you can design it so you can track the whole history of a resource from its creation to its consumption.

- And the coins/tokens per se, particularly when you are not looking at them as general currency or toll tokens that you simply buy and spend somewhere but when you look at them as incentives where you can control how they are created, distributed, deposited, what it means to hold/deposit them, and how to spend them. You can change who the stakeholder is and monetize user's attention, his data, behaviour. I don't think people quite figured it out yet how to properly apply this for things like social networks, journalism or creative work ("patreonism"), but it's being explored and moving along.

Everything is still quite immature and moving at breakneck speed with uncountable new projects and ideas appearing all the time, which I see them as proof of concepts of the capabilities above, variations of them, of even new different ones. And lots of scams or profiteers wanting to get into the blockchain/ICO hype.

It's quite hard to find the balance between the exagerated hype and the naysayers (which I feel lots are just an exagerated reaction against the hype), but I assure you, it's way more than just what anyone with a CS background can come up with.