Higher education institutions (HEIs) are organizations staffed with experts in all sorts of fields who contribute their expertise and experience to the endeavor of producing and preserving knowledge. As ‘knowledge organizations’, HEIs need to improve their information and knowledge management (IKM) to respond to the internal and external environments in which they operate. A very high percentage of their employees work as specialists in specific scientific fields and disciplines and are responsible for advancing various scientific disciplines through knowledge creation and development. However the intelligence of an organization depends not only on the sum total of individual knowledge, but on organizational knowledge, the sum total of accumulated knowledge, experience and networking at the HEI. Organizational knowledge is greater than the sum of its parts, therefore a crucial challenge for HEIs wishing to achieve more of it is the enhancement of processes of interaction across hierarchical and functional borders, transparency of competencies, learning from experiences, etc. The performance of the experts usually is best evaluated by their peers within and outside the HEI and by the relevant community, which will be found predominantly outside of the organization. Experts also tend to identify with their (external) community more than with their own organizations. HEIs increasing autonomy from government interference goes hand-in-hand with the implementation of new management approaches like IKM. That HEIs either are using or are planning to use new tools like internet services, document management, e-learning, e-library, centralized system administration (for students and employees), email, information servers, decision support systems, reporting solutions, etc. underscores the importance of professional IKM. The modernization of higher education (HE) has forced the institutions to store, manage and use existing information and knowledge stores in a better way in order to meet new accountability, effectiveness and efficiency requirements. In this chapter we will discuss some strategic applications of information management at HEIs in addition to proposing a basic structure for IT-services if they are to provide support systems for knowledge management. We will concentrate on knowledge management as a key aspect of expert organizations. Because IKM is underdeveloped at most HEIs, we will pay particular attention to the instruments and methods of knowledge management so that readers become familiar with the basic tools. Our case study focuses on one of the central instruments of knowledge management at expert organizations in Austria, namely the intellectual capital statement (ICS), which Austrian universities are required to prepare for the government nowadays. A specific instrument of IKM, ICS is designed to monitor the development of intellectual assets. At the end of this chapter we will provide some key factors for further improvement and development of IKM at HEIs
