The more relaxed standards of yesteryear do not suffice any more. Whereas in many organizations, informal evaluation has in the past been the norm, it's often no longer acceptable to sanction the personal bias this can lead to. Nepotism, class elitism, sexism and racism are being abandoned in most places round the world, and more formal assessment is needed to be fair. In education, in many countries, there is pressure to teach more people, more effectively without a similar increase in resources. A trend to equal opportunity for all means higher intakes at university.
More people means that formal, objective assessment is more useful.
So in business and in education, we need to use assessment to sieve and measure people to fit our knowledge based society. As we all know, computers are very good at some things, and much less good at others. You can use a computer to find a spelling mistake in a book that would take a person ages to find. But you couldn't ask a computer to reply to a complaint from a customer, or at least not to a customer you want to keep. In training and education, much attention is focused on the idea of using computers to teach.