Systems, methods and computer program products for assisting a user who is designing a project in selecting a technical architecture suitable for the project. A catalog of architectures and architecture components and various criteria to be met by project architectures, including such as technical standards, organization policies and guidelines, and legal or regulatory ones, are stored. The catalog may be web-based. Questions are posed to the user about the nature of the project, and a rules engine guides the user through relevant portions of the catalog based on the user's answers to the questions, and a set of one or more architectures that would be suitable for the project is proposed to the user. Once the user selects an architecture, the rules engine leads the user through a review of the stored criteria applicable to the project, to identify any that are not met by the selected architecture.