the Enterprise Architect as time traveller

To be an Enterprise Architect is to live in a bit of a temporal disconnect from the rest of the world.

This disconnect is two-fold:
1) Architecture, to my mind, must be looking at the continuously receeding 3-year time horizon.
That creates the critical bridge between the day-to-day and month-to-month activities of the organization, and the organization's stated 5-year strategic plan.
2) The people in your organization may not even be living in the present.  They may have a technological viewpoint that lags several years behind.

So you're in the meeting room in 2006, and you're trying to have a conversation based on where you think things will be in 2009, meanwhile, the organization is still back in 2001.

That is a huge challenge.
In fact, I would say one of the biggest single challenges is trying to find ways to move people's thinking forward.  And I don't have any solution.  So far my recommendation is:

inform and be ready

Tell the organization that based on their goals and the current technology environment, they will need X, do the necessary models to support X and then... wait.  Generally in about 9 months, after having completed their journey of discovery, the organization will come to you and say "we've just discovered, we need X".

Is this business-driven?
To me, as long as you are working from the strategic plan created by the business, you are business-driven.  A key role of the architect is to be the Keeper of the Plan, and the Great Reminder.

It's not that you can't change the plan, it's just that that should be a conscious decision, not a function of drift.  If you said your strategic goal for 2010 was to build a soaring stone cathedral, and you land in 2010 having built only a bunch of wooden houses and two sheds... to me that's the biggest single metric indicating success or failure of the EA.

Anyone else have ideas on key metrics to qualitatively or quantitatively assess the success of the EA?

Any thoughts on bridging the time warp between 3 and 5 year strategic visions and the day-to-day of project and operations execution?  Better ideas for moving the organization's technology thinking forward, rather than just "inform and be ready"?