For example, a future version of ITIL could help an insurance company whose IT services include capturing and processing claims data and photographs from field agents via handhelds, he says.

Cannon says the authors of v3 decided not to address specific technologies such as iPods, "but that will start changing." He says new processing approaches that are undergoing rapid evolution and can't be precisely defined at the moment, such as service-oriented architectures, were also deliberately omitted, but that too will change. V3 is intended to have a shelf life of eight to 10 years, but it will be accompanied over time by topic-specific "complementary guides," he says.

Sarasota County's Ott speculates that now that ITIL has been broadened to embrace business concepts more rigorously, it may be applicable even outside of IT, to any situation where a team of people is providing a service to customers. It could be applied in a call center, for example, and not just to those parts of the center that are strictly IT based. "We've all talked about the loss of service in the US," he says. "I think this is a way to structurally put it back in place."