As you say: in practice, the fact that ITIL is broadening out does not mean that current ITIL practitioners will all expand to cover the full stack. Rather, by making the reach of ITIL that much broader, other individuals within a company (and other services firms) will come in to fill the gaps, or alliances will be struck.

The new content in ITIL v3 is not new information in the marketplace - just new to the framework. Wise companies and vendors will look to experienced staff (irrespective of whether they have an ITIL background or not) to fill the strategy boxes, and use the ITIL v3 framework to set the context for discussions.

Any strategist worth paying money for should not have a problem taking the Service Strategy book and using it as a starting point to present their standard consulting / planning approach in a light well suited to IT management. Good operations people should likewise be able to talk about their domain expertise using more appropriate language to a business conversation. Breaking down the communication silos between business and IT is a good thing.

Those who see ITIL as being impertinent by sticking its nose into areas that are essential to a well run IT environment are both right and wrong. Yes, some people from an ITIL background are going to end up trying to teach experts in e.g. enterprise architecture to suck eggs, and will do themselves and their companies no favours in doing so. Conversely, to assume that an operations expert looking after a large budget cannot understand strategy is as incorrect as assuming a strategist can know nothing about how to actually run an IT shop.

There's more than enough examples of strategies that are blind or overly ambitious, or operations teams acting as a brake on good ideas, that the smart individual will be willing to learn from "the other guys". Perhaps both sides should agree to make the v3 books their common enemy when disputes arise, rather than fight each other. That way they get agreement and hopefully progress, while the OGC and vendors should get feedback to improve ITIL itself.

As ITIL is not prescriptive, the successful companies and individuals will be those who use ITIL v3 as a framework, the concepts as practical advice - as usual. Likewise, all strategy models, consulting methods and suchlike are tools that can be adapted by a competent consultant. It will be interesting to see who will prove themselves capable of avoiding all the hype, FUD and egos, and get on with delivering real results. The potential is very much there.

...will struggle most of all. These days if you tried to sell the ability to develop software based purely on the IDE that you used then no-one would take you seriously. So claims of 'look we can implement our Cure/Hunting Bird software and that will help you do Strategy at board level' are going to look pretty silly. My guess is that the big consulting firms (who already have plenty of C level access) will simply remarket their current offerings as 'ITIL v3 conforming' and use their board level influence to sell them. Maybe they will engage the 'shop floor specialists' to deliver training and implement tools where appropriate, leaving their own staff free to concentrate on influencing and developing strategy.