text: what is the best approach to setting up a business intelligence system without elaborate software? i am looking to set up a system that continuously provides background and data to a portale or dashboard.something that allows a continuous flow of intelligence on either companiesor competitive products.  what systems have people implemented using open source or free tools out there. business intelligence involves collecting quite a bit of information and analyzing it. many business use tools to achieve this. a few of the data tools are data modeling, data warehouses, and data mining. data tools help employees collect the data and analyze it efficiently. data tools are for organizational purposes mostly. online analytical processing (olap) is used in the analyzing process. olap is sometimes simply referred to as analytics, which is based on the hypercube or "cube" and dimensional analysis.  some businesses also use software vendors for bi tools. there are quite a few enterprises offering bi technology. if a business does not get the bi tools themselves, then software vendor will provide a business with tools, and sometimes software support and bi professionals who will help the company analyze results and collect data. some companies providing bi software are siebel systems, microsoft, altius consulting, business-soft, and sas institute.  for more info read this site http://www.wareprise.com/articles/business-intelligence-101.php