Founder
Angkana Whiley
Twenty years leading data, policy and transformation inside the Australian, Queensland and ACT public services, then two years advising governments on it from PwC. She founded Whiley Group in July 2024.
She has run this work from both sides of the table — as the executive accountable for a government data function, and as the adviser brought in to fix one. That is most of what shapes how Whiley Group engages: small teams, inside the problem, building capability that stays behind after the engagement ends.
“I certainly didn't always see the world through data eyes. I was converted later on, when I was working on a specific project and I had a lightbulb moment.”angkana@whileygroup.com.au
How she got here
Anthropology
She grew up in Southeast Asia and moved to Queensland with her family at eleven. The degree was in anthropology — a stranger route into government data than it sounds, given the discipline is about understanding people through evidence, which is most of the job.
A lightbulb moment
Data came later, on a project where she watched evidence-based analysis change what a government could actually do for people.
“I then started to look at the world — and really see how data is all around us. It's in the way the roads are built, how the cars drive on it, in the way people behave with each other.”
Leaving the door open
She sits on the board of Women in ICT and the Australian Evaluation Society's policy committee, and co-founded the Policy to Impact Consortium. She is explicit about why.
“If I have a foot in the door, I need to leave that door open for the next person that's like me.”
At the ACT Data Analytics Centre she led the team that released the territory's first data governance and management framework, in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. It gave the ACT public service a common language and a shared set of standards for working with data for the first time — and it unlocked holdings that had been sitting in silos for years.
Credentials
Published work and the roles behind it. All of it independently checkable.
2020
The ACT's first data governance framework
Released for the ACT public service
Written and released mid-pandemic. It gave the territory's public service one shared language and one set of standards for working with data.
2018
Data Strategy 2018–20
Department of Industry, Innovation and Science
The department's data strategy, designed to build the capability and culture behind evidence-led policy.
Read the strategy2019 – 2022
Executive Branch Manager, Data and Analytics
ACT Government — Data Analytics Centre
SES Band 1. Led the centre and the territory's information and data-sharing reforms.
2022 – 2024
Director, Data Strategy and Delivery
PwC Consulting
Advised executives across every level of Australian government and in international jurisdictions.
Also
- Board member, Women in ICT
- Policy committee, Australian Evaluation Society
- Co-founder, Policy to Impact Consortium