The colored ties were actually used in outdoor pedestals in a buried plant. Since you could only see the few feet of cable in the ped before it went underground, we put colored ties to indicate which way they came from. Perhaps not quite the same as conduits inside a building, but sometimes the conduits go into the ceiling and you can't see which way they're going. At the least, you should mark the cable that feeds the splice box.

Here's the colors and directions, as I learned it with GTE:

Blue Towards the CO. Dial tone feeds in from this cable.
Orange North
Green East
Brown South
Slate West

You're also correct that we used colored ties to separate binder groups in cables, too.

Jim