Driving Better Outcomes Through Evidence: A Conversation with Eleanor Williams

Eleanor Williams
Managing Director, Australian Centre for Evaluation, Department of Treasury

About Eleanor

Describe your work in a single sentence:
I lead a team who work to increase the volume, quality and use of evaluation evidence for the Australian Public Service.

Share your career journey so far – would you say it was conventional?
My career has stayed pretty firmly in the space of trying to deliver public value, but has jumped between public policy, research and evaluation over the past 20 years.

What challenges do you own in your organisation?
I own the challenge of trying to win hearts and minds on the value of evaluating our policies and programs—so that we can learn and continuously improve.

When you step onto that stage, what’s one thing you want people to know about you?
I am incredibly passionate about the value that good evidence can bring to public policy and achieving better outcomes for Australians from all of our government services.

Advice and Insights

What’s one piece of advice for building a business case for a new project?
Think about how you will measure success from the start. Plan to invest in good data collection and monitoring so you’ll know whether you’re achieving your aims.

What’s your advice for someone looking to progress to that next level in the public sector?
Find something you are truly passionate about and become a subject matter expert—while also building your generalist skills.

What’s one skill every public sector employee should be learning to improve service delivery?
Learn how to measure your impact through high-quality evaluation!

Don’t miss Eleanor Willias live at the Government Innovation Showcase Federal on the 12th of November 2025. She will be discussing Maximising AI Value in Government and Scaling AI Impact with her panel at 2:45PM

Register here. 

View the agenda here.

On Vision and Innovation

What does an innovative public sector look like to you?
An innovative public sector knows how to experiment—and learn from those experiments.

How would you describe the future of public sector service delivery in three words?
Flexible, tailored, and relational.

What is the end-goal of service delivery in your department?
I work within Treasury to support great evidence-informed policy and practice, so I’d say the end goal is that service delivery consistently draws on the evolving evidence base and learns from leading practice.

Project Teaser: Elevating Evaluation

What problem will you be sharing a solution to onstage?
The need for better policy and program evaluation.

How will the public benefit from your project?
Evidence-informed approaches aim to lead to higher quality services across all portfolios.

What’s the secret ingredient to your project’s success?
Great senior champions across the Australian Public Service—and a large and growing evaluation profession (now more than 2,000 members).

What technology went into making your project possible?
We use a range of technologies in the delivery of our evaluation work, including increasingly using AI to expedite our data collection and analysis efforts.

How does your agency measure success—and does it differ by stakeholder?
The Australian Centre for Evaluation includes performance metrics in our publicly available strategy. These indicators are modelled closely on the UK Evaluation Taskforce and track the progress of evaluation investment and practice across the Australian Public Service.

Don’t miss Eleanor Willias live at the Government Innovation Showcase Federal on the 12th of November 2025. She will be discussing Maximising AI Value in Government and Scaling AI Impact with her panel at 2:45PM

Register here. 

View the agenda here.