40 years of multi-faceted change in the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration

A major challenge for European governments is solving the dilemma of increasing security and control of international trade, while at the same time reducing the administrative overhead carried by commercial and public administration organizations. Process redesign and use of ICT are widely perceived as key components of a solution. Thus, we see that many ICT-driven change efforts have taken and continue to take place under the header of eGovernment. These changes are not always successful, however, and not yet wellunderstood. In this article, we provide an interpretive longitudinal account of the strategic IS efforts at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA). Instead of focusing on IS that supports the government itself or the relations between governments and citizens, we seek to contribute to the sparse literature that is specifically directed at the interactions between EU initiatives in eGovernment, national governments, and businesses. By providing a narrative of DTCA that spans multiple levels and multiple time frames, we seek to explore eGovernment developments from the 1960s to now. We discuss our findings by examining the changes at DTCA building primarily on Van de Ven & Poole's (1995) work "Explaining development and change in organizations" in which they describe four "motors of change" - life cycle, teleology, dialectics, and evolution - and we combine it with some of Pettigrew's ideas on change. This combinatory theory offers a way of thinking about the occurrence of change in a dynamic context, both for researchers and practitioners. A key implication is that the theory is not only useful retrospectively, but can also be used toidentify "running motors" and as such, awareness of the complexities and dynamics of these change processes can provide an impetus for managers and action researchers to identifychallenges and opportunities to influence change. Keywords: eGovernment, eCustoms, regulation, organizational change, longitudinal, historical, interpretive