There is a trend in the software industry, and commercial industry in general, to adopt business processes which have, in turn, been adopted from the manufacturing industry, such as ISO 9000, which were originally developed to increase the quality of products built on assembly lines by increasingly unskilled workers. You can imagine the force a 120,000 employee company applies in adopting documented processes that define what each and every person does each and every day.
While the idea of documenting everything everyone does in written processes is purportedly a worthy goal (i.e. "Say what you do, and do what you say"), creativity is not something promoted in such an environment. How much professional creativity is expressed by the average assembly line worker? Uniformity and the ability to follow a prescribed list of instructions become the most valued qualities in such jobs--precisely the opposite of the traits that characterize creative people. And so, software development, a profession that was originally a field of much inventiveness and creativity, is becoming increasing driven to operate more like an assembly line.