James West graduated in Physics from Oxford University in 1976 and gained a PhD in High Energy Nuclear Physics in 1980 at Imperial College London. After a Science Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship based mainly at CERN, he joined IBM in 1981 at their Hursley Development Lab in the UK as a programmer.

Since 1984 he has held a variety of technical first and middle management positions in software development on most of IBM's major operating system and hardware platforms, covering microcode, application software, Transaction Processing and Computer-Telephony integration. From 1990 until 1992 he was assigned to the headquarters of IBM's Networking Systems division at Somers, New York.

Between 1993 and 1996 he was Information Technology manager at IBM UK Labs during which time the Hursley Lab established its own external internet presence and deployed internet technology widely within the Laboratory. In 1997 he was CICS Strategy and Planning Manager and in 1998 reported to the Hursley Laboratory Director as e-business Programme manager at IBM UK Labs Between 1998 and 2001 was Java Strategic Planning manager at the Java Technology Centre in Hursley, responsible for the IBM Java Development Kit and Java Virtual Machine technical strategy and IBM's utilisation of that technology in its middleware and on Linux.

From 2001 to 2009 he was Technical Strategy manager for IBM's message oriented middleware (WebSphere MQ family) and for its WebSphere based Enterprise Service Bus products and technologies.Over that period he oversaw the technical strategy for these key technologies underpinning IBM's WebSphere software platform ensuring customer requirements, market and technology trends and relevant open standards were incorporated.

In 2009 he became the Development Operations manager for the Vice President of Connectivity Product Development and IBM UK Labs Director.

In February 2010, Dr West retired from IBM to take up the position of Executive Director of SEPnet.

Dr West is a Fellow of the British Computer Society. He is an IBM Certified Executive Project Manager Project Management Institute certified Project Management Professional.