The goal of any organisation, business or otherwise, is to grow.
In the past, the size of a company was determined by the number of physical products that one either created or sold. Say you built and sold left-handed toolboxes. If you sold enough of these left-handed toolboxes, and if they were of good enough quality, more people wanted your toolboxes, so you created more.
With this growth, was a need to keep a record of these products, customers, sales, etc. Companies simply kept records in pen and paper, in stacks of ledgers. Soon these started to fill filing cabinets and these cabinets started to fill rooms and even buildings.