Practitioners also regard the total GIS software or mapping software solution as including operating personnel and the data that go into the system. GIS has come a long way in the last two years. If your mapping software or GIS is older than two years old, it is quite likely obsolete. Old fashioned GIS's are slow and expensive. Modern GIS packages cost less than two hundred dollars and provide more performance than older systems.
Mapping software is now very high performance and inexpensive.
Free GIS software of various kinds has become available, although it is usually a viewer tied to a much more expensive package. More importantly, there are numerous Government sources of free maps. Free GIS maps are the best kind. A GIS, which can use information from many different sources, in many different forms can help with such analyses. The primary requirement for the GIS source data is that the locations for the variables are known.