Would SLA be more effective in improving public services?

In the past year or so, Singapore had seen a significant rise in disruption of public services – SMRT, SingTel, StarHub, M1, and Singapore Power.

It makes one wonder what’s happening to Singapore’s pride in maintaining a high level of quality services. The government has stepped in to introduce KPI (key performance indicator) to ensure the service providers adhere to a high level standard in provision of services.

Nonetheless, wouldn't one wonder if simply setting a target for them to meet, seems like it doesn't matter how the service providers would achieve these, would suffice in ensuring quality services provided.

Would having SLAs (Service Level Agreement) stipulating the need to achieve certain level of quality services, as well as indication of contingency plans in place, like recovery cycle time to restore services, be a better and more effective way to manage the disruptions we have encountered thus far?

It took a major fire incident with a major disruption to actually find out how effective is SingTel’s contingency and recovery plans are.

Similarly, we now learned through a painful experience of a major riot, not seen for more than 40 years, to realise how ready and prepared our police force is to handle such social outbreaks.

Does any service provider realise what it takes to provide and maintain a high level of quality service without disruption, and if any disruption occurs, how quickly can they resolve the problem? What contingency plans do they have in place, and how quickly can they activate these?

Moreover, these service providers may need to depend on other vendors as well as service providers to ensure their services wouldn’t be disrupted. For example, SMRT services would certainly be disrupted if there is a power failure. So, is there a SLA between SMRT and SP to ensure services don’t get disrupted in any major manner with contingency plans in place?

What we have noticed and seen so far are the government’s actions to get the service providers’ acts together, with pretty steep penalties. However, do we know how to ensure the impact of disruptions are minimised and prevented if possible?

SLA is needed more so today, with increased complexity in the supply chain operations involving many different vendors or suppliers, and outsourced services. Service providers like SMRT might need to have numerous SLAs in place in order to ensure a smooth ride for our population with very minimal impact in disruption of the service.