Jan Baan says that part of his mission in life is to contribute to the innovation of business operations. He has been lauded for his skills as an entrepreneur, but he admits that it has taken 30 years to hone his management skills. At Baan, he considered himself a visionary in charge of building the culture and overseeing R&D. But you need more than vision in business, which may have contributed to the rise and what some consider the fall of the Baan Co. Founded in 1978, Baan hit a rough financial patch in the 1990s, and, under much scrutiny, its namesake resigned as CEO in 1998. The company was acquired by Invensys in the year 2000, only to be sold to two American investment companies, which merged it with SSA Global, now part of Infor.

After his departure, Jan Baan continued to invest in technology companies, but lived a quiet life out of the public eye. That is starting to change.

Recently, Baan resurfaced with an autobiography, The Way To Market Leadership, My Life As An Entrepreneur. And he is looking to make an impact with Cordys Software, the company he founded in 2001 and now leads as chairman. Cordys specializes in business process management software that relies on Web standards, such as XML, to deliver adaptable components that allow individual users to configure their own application mash-ups to fit business needs.

"Forget developers; [users] can be their own composers," Baan said.

The Cordys technology could be considered an evolution of what Baan Co. set out to do with Baan Web, which allowed a network of strategic partners to collaborate within an open IT architecture. The idea was a bit ahead of its time, considering that licensing models based on closed architectures prevailed in the 1990s.

Since then, Baan has honed his views on ERP, which forms the backbone of many companies' information systems.

"ERP was for the department level, and it was never designed for the Internet," Baan told Managing Automation in an interview. And even with today's services-oriented architectures, he claimed, "IT can't meet business [requirements], because it is still point-to-point integrations."

"I believe BPM will replace ERP," Baan said during his keynote presentation at the MESA conference in Orlando, FL, in September.

The new wave, he said, involves a collaborative workspace that integrates IT and business functions, a form of business process management where Cordys has looked to carve out its niche. Cordys, however, is not your typical BPM provider, according to Baan, since its technology is designed in a way that reduces reliance on IT or current software suppliers. It gives everyday users - not IT departments - the ability to adapt applications to the required business process, according to its founder.

That's not to say companies should throw out their SAP, Oracle, or even Baan implementations (Baan still has a strong presence in the aerospace industry). Rather, Cordys technology can be layered over legacy installations as a way to align IT and business, because ultimately it's humans - not technology - that drive business.