DevOps, CI/CD and Automation

I'm having serious problems deploying a .NET application from my local machine to a production web server. Here are the details.

"Server Error in '/nipr2' Application.
System.Data.OracleClient requires Oracle client software version 8.1.7 or greater.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Exception: System.Data.OracleClient requires Oracle client software version 8.1.7 or greater."

On my local machine where I have been testing this I have Oracle Discoverer set up and a TNSNAMES.ORA that I use with PL/SQL Developer, etc. Basically, an ORA_HOME is set up. Do I need an ORA_HOME set up on this IIS box to get this to work? If so, how can I do that without installing an Oracle application like Discoverer? I'm a newbie on Windows setup for Oracle applications. It's one of those things that has always "just worked" for me and I've never bothered with learning anything about it. I just upgraded the IIS box to .NET framework 3.5, so all drivers (System.Data.OracleClient.dll) should be up to date and the latest version.

This is driving me insane.

Thanks!