Sound Off: Enterprise Architecture (EA) are they relevant to Software Engineers?

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I have seen many enterprise architects across many customers and companies, and there is one consistent theme that I can pull out across the vast majority of them; what does the Enterprise Architecture (EA) team actually deliver and how is it relevant to my day to day job?  The question almost comes from software engineers 99% of the time and sometimes for other parts of the organization.  My questions to the software engineering community at large are as follows:

  1. What value to you get out of your EA team? 
  2. Does EA communicate the vision, and standards to you in an effective manner (or better yet do they communicate to you at all)?
  3. Are the standards your EA teams sets down in place relevant and do they keep up with the changing needs of the business or are they reactionary, they review standards when the development team forces their hands, by trying something new?
  4. Does the vast majority of solutions you build conform to the EA standards, and architectural roadmap?
  5. How would you like the EA team to communicate with you, and what deliverables would you like to see them tackle so they add (more) value to the solutions you build and deploy?

Your thoughts?

Thanks,

Ed