I’ve often pondered the stages of Network Deployment and Integration within companies – how they progress from the one stage of network complexity to the next. And if you work at enough different organisations you realise that they all companies operate in similar ways, and have similar adoption of Networking. From an IT infrastructure perspective, most organisations use the same basic service models.

In a sense, networking provides the human equivalent of the nervous system which allows the myriad corporate organs to communicate, signal and co-operate. This, of course, leads to consideration of the psychological perception of Networking.

In a recent blog, Alvaro Retana from HP (co-author of a number of outstanding textbooks including Cisco Press with Russ White and some others that are not vendor specific and Cisco CCAr/CCDE etc) wrote a blog post that is similar to something in my “to finish” list where he takes the Maslows Hierarchy of Needs and adapts it to how Networks are part of the corporate Hierarchy of Needs.