If you’ve ever traveled to Hawaii, you may recall seeing the Wiki Wiki shuttle buses that spirit passengers from Honolulu International Airport to their hotels. But you may have to use the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, to look up what the online version of a wiki could mean for your business.

A wiki (pronounced either wee-kee or wik-ee) is a Web site “that allows anyone visiting the site to add, to remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly, sometimes without the need for registration,” according to Wikipedia, which is itself one of the best-known wiki sites in the world. The concept was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, an Oregon programmer who named the fast means of editing an online site for the Hawaiian shuttles, whose name means “quick.”

Brian Keairns, a former Microsoft Corp. programmer who returned to Iowa to launch a customer service software company, CustomerVision, in 2001, saw the potential advantages that wikis could provide for businesses. He has developed a software application that is enabling his clients to build a new level of interactive Web site, or wiki, that can be tailored for both internal and external users.

“There are a lot of people talking about the ‘Web 2.0’ idea, taking the Web from read-only to read-write,” said Keairns. “There’s a general consensus that the enterprise will adopt these uses, but they have to be adapted to enterprise levels. We believe they will reach a tipping point where enterprises will increasingly embrace this participative approach.”

The company now provides its software, which operates on a secure network, to more than 100 businesses on a monthly subscription basis, among them two large financial services companies that have a large presence in Greater Des Moines, said Cindy Rockwell, CustomerVision’s president and CEO. The private company has grown from five people to 13 within the past two years, and has tripled its sales in each of those years, Rockwell said.

“We really hope that we see 300 percent growth this year,” she said. “We have a very aggressive growth strategy this year.”

A key element of the CustomerVision software is an “ask the expert” function that enables companies to route questions from employees to experts within the business who can answer them. Unlike an e-mail correspondence that answers the question just for the person who inquired, with the wiki the answer is posted for anyone who needs the information.

“It’s really geared around an architecture for participation,” Rockwell said. “(Users) basically have the ability to interact and share information in a more collaborative way.”

With CustomerVision’s assistance, Communications Data Services Inc. in Des Moines implemented an internal wiki application, which it calls “Ask CDS,” in January. The world’s largest magazine subscription fulfillment company, CDS services approximately 335 magazine titles and 25 direct-marketing companies.

“Our business is really highly information-driven,” said Tim Plimmer, CDS’ senior vice president of operations. With operating centers in locations spanning Bethlehem, Pa., to Prescott, Ariz., as well as six Iowa centers, “we were always looking for better ways to populate pertinent information about clients and services we perform and the nuances of their businesses and be able to distribute that across multiple enterprises,” he said.

After using it internally for several months among a few hundred of its operational employees, “we’re impressed with the software,” Plimmer said. “It’s doing what they said it would do and it’s filling a need we have for distribution and collaboration of information that’s critical to operating our business.”

CDS plans to begin introducing an external wiki to its clients as well as to its parent company, Hearst Corp., within the next three to six months, he said.

“So if one of our clients that publish gardening magazines has a reader with a question about lilies and can’t find it on their Web site, they can post this question,” Plimmer said. “The software will then route it based on subject matter experts, who will then respond back to the consumer. If that’s a highly asked question, it would (move) up to the top, so when you went to the FAQs, that would be one of the first things you would see.”

The software’s interactive Web capabilities may provide added revenue streams for CDS’s clients, or at the very least better position them as customer-service-driven companies that will stick out in customers’ minds when the time comes to renew their magazine subscriptions, Plimmer said.

Another local company, the Foster Group, plans to use the software to connect an open-source community of financial advisers it’s creating at www.lifewealthcommunity.com.

“We really just kicked it off in the last 30 days,” said David Bush, co-founder of the Foster Group. “We’re just starting to engage client relationships using the wiki technology.” The proprietary life planning process developed by Foster is designed for “financial professionals who want to take their financial planning relationships to a new level of commitment, purposeful living and integrative planning.”

The training company hopes to attract a base of between 50 and 100 financial advisers who will access the site’s resources by paying a monthly fee. “And hopefully, it grows from there,” Bush said. “It’s basically the law of attraction, to have advisers who are already doing this share their practices online.”

CustomerVision’s subscriptions for its hosted software product ranges from $100 to $5,000 per month, based on the size of the organization, which includes around-the-clock account support, Rockwell said. The size of the sites supported range from about 30 pages to thousands.

Part of CustomerVision’s support during its start-up phase came from Emerging Growth Group, a Des Moines-based incubator company.

“They’ve worked their way around to find a very nice niche for themselves,” said John LaMarche, EGG’s vice president. The incubator company has a small equity stake in CustomerVision, which began with a broad vision of providing knowledge management and incident tracking for businesses. “From my perspective, having seen where the product started, they’ve really done a good job of responding to a market need they’ve identified.”

So far, LaMarche has used the product to update his organization’s Web site, but not for internal communications.

“Just using it for my limited purposes, I can see where it could become an indispensable tool,” he said. “One client company has been creating very complex training for software. And certainly in the financial services sector, it does fit very well in an organization where you’ve got lots of people working on many projects that are multi-faceted.”