James Martin was born on 19 October 1933 in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, England.^[7] He earned a degree in physics at Keble College, Oxford.

Martin joined IBM in 1959, and from the 1980s on, established several IT consultancy firms. Starting in 1981 with Dixon Doll and Tony Carter he established DMW (Doll Martin Worldwide) in London, UK, which was later renamed James Martin Associates (JMA), which was (partly) bought by Texas Instruments Software in 1991. He later co-founded Database Design Inc. (DDI), in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to promulgate his database design techniques and to develop tools to help implement them. After becoming the market leader in information technology engineering software, DDI was renamed KnowledgeWare and eventually purchased by Fran Tarkenton, who took it public.
Martin was awarded an honorary fellowship by Keble College, Oxford^[when?] and an honorary Doctor of Science degree by the University of Warwick in July 2009.^{[citation needed]} He gave the Turing Lecture in 2008.^[1] According to Computerworld's 25th anniversary issue, he was ranked fourth among the 25 individuals who have most influenced the world of computer science.^[8]
The Martin thread in information technology engineering was strategy-driven from the outset and from 1983 was focused on the possibility of automating the development process through the provision of techniques for business description that could be used to populate a data dictionary or encyclopaedia that could in turn be used as source material for code generation. The Martin methodology provided a foundation for the CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) tool industry.
Martin himself had significant stakes in at least four CASE tool vendors—InTech (Excelerator), Higher Order Software, KnowledgeWare, originally Database Design Inc, (Information Engineering Workbench) and James Martin Associates, originally DMW and now Headstrong (the original designers of the Texas Instruments' CA Gen facility and the principal developers of the methodology).
At the end of the 1980s and early 1990s the Martin thread incorporated rapid application development (RAD) and business process reengineering (BPR) and soon after also entered the object oriented field.