I have just started a piece of work to look at ITIL v3 and undertake a gap analysis against our current Service Management  portfolio.  From initial observations ITIL v3 appears to move from best practice to something that is largely theoretical and not proven best practice. It is difficult to understand why most companies would want to adopt it. ITIL v3 is now five books for a ridiculous price of approx £300 and on top of this the training and certification could cost you a further £2000 per person.
Having said that the new structure makes good sense the five books are now; Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operations and Continual Service Improvement. This follows the service life-cycle much better than the process stove pipes that were created by ITIL v2. And in reality this is how many of us have thought about Service Management. I suppose my main concern is that it addresses none of the real issues Service Managers are facing,

- How to managed virtualised environments?

- How to ensure good release management practices for High Performance Grids?

- How to manage the convergence in the telco market place?

These problems do not appear to have been considered by the authors of ITIL v3.