My first question would be, what is the audience. Is this for building in-house software that only your team will build? If so, explore some of the options already presented. If this is something that others will be building, either stick with make, or use a tool that creates makefile and ship those. We use autoconf and automake for Linux and other unix platforms. In my opinion, you need a very good reason to do something other than configure; make; make install. Boost has their own tool (a modified version of Jam), and it annoys me everytime I need to try and get it to compile on an unusual machine.
