Before the Internet revolution gave us 'always on' connectivity and 24/7 functionality that could be accessed from anywhere in the world, we still had great applications....
... they just usually took longer to build.
This 'Industrial Age' of software development was quite straight-forward. Each project was planned out in a 'waterfall' process, where task followed task. Scoping led to requirements and specifications, eventual development was lengthy and all dependencies were mapped out and followed.
IT strategy followed the same process (unsurprisingly really, given that the people overseeing the projects were most likely the contributors to the strategy). This meant that the overall plan of work was not thought of in terms of weeks or even months, but in years. Any changes to the scope or requirements of a particular project in mid-flow potentially meant a huge impact to the delivery date of that project and many others, therefore were not changed that often - the result was that by the time applications were released they were not actually fit for the business purpose they had originally been proposed for, things had moved by then.
