A few weeks ago, I sent a draft of my remarks to Andy Bytheway for his comments.  His overall reaction was: given that the state of IS research in South Africa is embryonic, with one or two notable exceptions, the five challenges that I'm presenting appear timely and they suggest, in Andy's words, the following message, "Now look here..., before you slavishly follow the work in N America and the rest of the world, just think about [these five things]."  Well, let me try to present this a bit more humbly: We IS scholars in North America have made a number of mistakes and, in my estimation, we're are on the road to repeating these mistakes and making new ones.  Now, rather than your re-inventing the wheel and learning these lessons all over again, you might take our past experiences as your starting point, rather than wasting your time and resources in repeating them.