ISconf comes from the "InfraStructure administration" movement which created and defined most of the OS-side backgrounds (in theory terms) of what is now making up the DevOps sphere.
ISconf enforces the order of operations by assuming only commands issued through it change the state of the system.
As a result, if a package or file is installed on a system manually, it will stay there, which may eventually cause problems such as version conflicts.
It had in fact been finished and put to use in larger environments but due to the delay saw limited community adoption.
As a result, one could consider ISconf an ancestor of Puppet, though both CFengine and Puppet implement the "convergence" model of configuration management, essentially the opposite of the "order of operations" model implemented by at least ISconf versions 1, 2, and 4.