Finance cannot verify what IT cannot explain. Marc Hesse has built a firm to close that gap—before the agentic age makes it unaffordable.
Picture a phone call on a cracked line. On one end, the CIO explains what the technology budget buys. On the other, the CFO hears static and asks for another report. Both raise their voices: more dashboards, more allocations, more slides. Nobody hears any better. Marc Hesse calls this the Trust Deficit, Finance cannot verify the value of technology, and IT cannot explain it in business terms. It is the problem his firm exists to resolve.
As Managing Partner and Technology Economist of Enterprise Value Consulting GmbH (EVC), Marc works toward one outcome: technology spend a CFO can trust, a CIO can steer, and a business leader can read, with the models still running months after the consultants have left. EVC is not a tool wrapper and does not sell frameworks. Its slogan settles the point: 0 framework dogma · 0 tool religion · 100% Technology Economics.
Marc came into technology through the side door. He started at the in-house consultancy of Deutsche Telekom on classic finance questions and moved toward technology without ever having had an IT background, which turned out to be the advantage. He could look at technology in business and financial terms without getting lost in the technicalities. That view became the core of his work.
What keeps him at it is a tension: accounting is built for stability, and technology changes faster than any ledger. His career has been about adapting financial management to that mismatch and getting IT financial management teams past their reputation as bean counters. In his view, modern ITFM has to become a differentiating capability—the function that lets an organization steer technology cost and value instead of merely recording it. Built as an internal digital product, it hands the data modeling to AI and frees people for change management, community building, and strategy. Organizations that get there steer their technology spend; the rest keep losing money on it without ever seeing where.
“ITFM is maturing into an internal digital product,” he says.
Turning Technology Cost into Business Value
The problem, for most companies, is not the money spent on technology. It is that nobody can say what the money buys. Technology, Finance, and the Business hold many conversations about the value of technology; few involve real listening on all three sides. Investments start paying off when the people who build the technology and the units that consume it agree on what value means. Cost is the first step, and only the first.
So the question a CIO should be able to answer is simple: what does the business get for every euro spent on IT, on the bottom line and on the top line? Faster transactions, quicker innovation, better products, a competitive edge. Answering it takes more than internal allocations. Spend has to be aligned with the applications, products, and services that business leaders recognize and can influence.
Technology becomes strategically valuable when its economic contribution can be explained to the person funding it. In the age of AI and a digital agent workforce, that requirement only sharpens. Agents produce numbers, models, and forecasts at any speed. What they cannot produce is the confidence a CFO, a CIO, and a business leader place in the same figure. Trust becomes the ultimate currency in an organization, and it is the human element in the equation.
Trust as the Foundation of Leadership
The defining moment in Marc’s career was co-founding EVC. He did not want a conventional consultancy driven by hierarchy and sales incentives, but a partnership built around trust, shared goals, specialist expertise, and intellectual freedom.
The people he wanted around him deliver quality over quantity, hold strong opinions, say no, and argue well. Team chemistry and room to develop count for more than a title. Specialists, not interchangeable resources.
That principle shaped EVC’s culture. Trust is not something consultants recommend to clients and practice selectively at home; leaders have to live it inside their own organizations first.
“Trust is not just what we advise clients on, it is how we chose to build EVC,” he asserts.
The same applies to financial management. IT financial management is one of the most undervalued and misunderstood functions in a technology organization. Where trust and real engagement exist, it becomes a lever for better governance, processes, platforms, and technology decisions, the superpower, in Marc’s words, that nobody expected from the controlling department.
Making Financial Management More Strategic
Marc’s approach moves financial management from reporting to active technology cost steering. His illustration is SAP. Traditional accounting spreads the bookings correctly across the contract period, technically right, and useless for a decision.
A steering model shows license prices, actual consumption, reclaimable resources, and the financial consequences of each option. That matters more every year, as AI adds visible and less visible costs to every technology environment.
Leaders do not only need costs recorded accurately; they need financial information that improves the next technology decision. That shift, from cost accounting to technology cost and value steering, is the alignment modern organizations require.
Balancing Efficiency with Transformation
Digital transformation demands innovation and financial discipline at the same time, the Königsdisziplin, the supreme discipline, as Marc calls it, especially under real financial pressure.
At an automotive client, efficiency became the transformation’s funding source. The savings were real only where the team understood the technical setup in detail; only then could money be found that could genuinely be redirected to strategic initiatives rather than promised on a slide.
Technology that can become a differentiator deserves a different funding logic: run several bets, expect some to fail, keep the ones that work, and book the rest as learning.
Discipline needs rigorous analysis; innovation needs a culture willing to experiment. Neither replaces the other.
Building Enterprise Cost Fitness
Marc’s thinking on efficiency was shaped as interim head of ITFM, when a zero-based budgeting exercise made the point unmistakably: no cost is permanent. Is it still necessary? Is it needed now? Is it needed at this level?
He does not treat zero-based budgeting as a ritual. The mindset is what counts.
His comparison is physical fitness: cut the fat, keep the muscle that performs. One aggressive cost-cutting round creates the next problem; a regular check-up keeps an enterprise fit.
Which is why cost discussions belong early in investment decisions, not at the end of the budget year. Enterprise cost management should work like a corporate check-up, consistent, informed, and focused on long-term fitness.
Preparing for the Agentic AI Era
Among emerging technologies, Marc sees agentic AI as the most consequential, for technology operations and for financial management alike. AI is one of the fastest-growing and least-governed categories of enterprise spend, with implications reaching from the P&L to energy consumption.
Agentic AI also rewrites ITFM itself. A traditional budgeting cycle runs on human capacity, handbooks, training sessions, meetings, and the same questions about accounts, exchange rates, and procedures asked a hundred times. Marc sees planning agents taking that over working like junior colleagues, fast and tireless, but needing guidance, guardrails, and reliable sources.
His picture for it is a newsroom: the agents do the reporting—pulling the numbers, reconciling the sources, drafting the first version, while the human stays in the loop as editor-in-chief, setting the agenda and approving the final message before it goes out. The digital workforce does the work; a human signs it off. ITFM professionals stop being number crunchers and become scenario planners who shape competitive advantage.
“A CIO who cannot account for the digital workforce will not be allowed to grow it,” he states.
Leadership That Builds Trust and Adaptability
Across his consulting journey, Marc has seen one pattern in organizations that succeed over the long run: they build trust into their operations.
That means figures people believe, honesty about unresolved problems, and an environment where bad news travels upward without fear. Leadership fails the moment employees hide difficult information because they dread the reaction.
These organizations also think in products rather than waterfalls. Continuous improvement beats rigid planning because a budget is an estimate of a future that will change, so the plan has to be allowed to change with it.
Tools and processes cannot produce that. The culture has to.
Practicing Transformation from Within
Marc’s confidence that smaller firms can now challenge established incumbents comes from EVC’s own experience.
Because the firm works on the same class of problems again and again, AI compounds its capabilities rather than merely accelerating single tasks. EVC built a complete ITFM maturity assessment in weeks rather than months and moved its delivery model toward outcome-driven work: more advisory value, fewer presentation-heavy deliverables.
The method is the one it recommends to clients, experiment, test with clients, keep what works, reshape what does not. Transformation is more credible when the people advising it have done it to themselves.
“We practice the transformation on ourselves first,” he says.
Closing the Trust Deficit
At the heart of Marc’s work is one requirement: technology value has to be understandable to Finance and IT at the same time. The Trust Deficit is what happens when it is not, Finance cannot verify, IT cannot explain, and every additional report only adds volume to the static on the line.
Through EVC, he closes it by making technology spending legible, steerable, and trusted between CIO and CFO. His experience inside major ITFM platform vendors shows him where tools fall short. EVC’s answer is specialist knowledge, models developed in practice, and lessons tested across more than 50 enterprise engagements in TBM and FinOps.
Expertise also means knowing when to challenge established approaches. The measure of success is whether a solution is adopted and still operating months after the consultants have left; a polished presentation does not count.
The Superpower Team
Marc’s advice to leaders is short. Build blended human–digital teams around motivation, capability, and shared direction, and use AI where human capacity runs out.
Protect time for the new alongside the core business, and run it with a product mindset, close to the market, in servant leadership.
And fix the line between the CIO and the CFO before adding another report to it: if technology value cannot be explained to the person funding it, the investment has lost its strategic clarity.
“Fix the line before you raise your voice. Clarity is the highest form of trust,” he advises.
Enterprise value does not come from technology spending alone. It comes when the CIO can explain that spending, the CFO can trust it, and both can act on what the numbers say.
